Effects of intranasal oxytocin on social transfer of pain in rodents
作者单位：Institute for Biomedical Sciences of Pain Tangdu Hospital The Fourth Military Medical University Key Laboratory of Brain Stress and BehaviorPLA Beijing Institute for Brain Disorders
会议名称：《中国神经科学学会第十二届全国学术会议》
会议日期：2017年
学科分类：0710[理学-生物学] 07[理学] 071006[理学-神经生物学]
基 金：Supported by grants from the National Basic Research Development Program of China (2013CB835100) the Natural Science Foundation of China (81571072 to JC 31600855 to C-LL)
摘 要：It has been recently found that pain can be socially contagious and transferred from a pain-sufferer to a na?ve, healthy conspecific through social interaction in rodents. This phenomenon is explained as empathy for pain. However, the social transfer of pain is selectively dependent upon the extent of familiarity established by co-housing of the animals in the same cage for at least two to three weeks. Moreover, lesions of the bilateral medial prefrontal cortex（m PFC） can eliminate the empathy for pain. Oxytocin（OXT）, a neuropeptide, is known to be essential for social behaviors such as empathy, mother-child bonding, social cognition/recognition, affiliation, attachment, and sociability in humans. Intranasal delivery of OXT has been demonstrated to be effective to enhance sociability and empathy in humans. Here we present a new line of experimental evidence showing that endogenous OXT mediates empathy for pain in rodents through direct action on its receptor in the m PFC and intranasal OXT can produce empathy for pain between stranger rats. Electrophysiological recordings further demonstrate that pre-synaptic GABA release is enhanced in the m PFC in rats with empathy for pain that is largely dependent on OXT.