from Hacker News

Oxytocin nasal spray apparently makes an autistic guy not autistic

by nhoven on 1/25/22, 3:53 PM with 17 comments

  • by jonnycomputer on 1/25/22, 7:39 PM

    Oxytocin and autism has been studied for some time, and the use of nasal oxytocin as treatment for autism has also been studied. Better if we looked at the literature than get excited by a random reddit post reposted on twitter.

    e.g. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C47&q=oxy...

  • by more_corn on 1/25/22, 6:24 PM

    This sounds super exciting. I can’t help but wonder though... The language sounds weird. Maybe that’s because the person writing has Asperger’s, but it almost sounds like how a NT person would think someone with Asperger’s would talk. We probably need to move into the mode of requiring extraordinary evidence before we get to excited.

    One thought that might explain mixed study results, aren’t there like half a dozen kinds of autism? I would imagine that if the study failed to account for the difference the results could be inconsistent.

    It seems like a promising area of research though.

  • by StrictDabbler on 1/25/22, 6:27 PM

    The Twitter commenter who described this as "neurotypicality fan-fiction" pretty much nailed it.

  • by sergiomattei on 1/25/22, 5:42 PM

    X for Doubt, but interesting nonetheless.

    Not so sure about spraying psychoactive chemicals up my brain without more trip reports though…

    Edit: apparently a study found it ineffective https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/intranasal-oxytocin-ineffe...

  • by kadoban on 1/25/22, 5:18 PM

    Very interesting, but it's also a twitter summary of a random reddit post, so I'm thinking this is unlikely to be true.

  • by cpcallen on 1/25/22, 8:01 PM

  • by LazyMans on 1/25/22, 9:04 PM

    The effects described are pretty much precisely what MDMA feels like. Weird.