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There has been a lot of speculation and hope that giving oxytocin to people with histories of attachment rupture could help them in bonding. The answer at least in mice is not necessarily so. It’s more complicated than that and there are significant differences in findings depending on where mice were measured- out in the real world or in the lab. It’s an important piece and after reading it you are likely to say what I did: Well, of course.
Why Oxytocin Is More Than Just the "Love Hormone"
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A study of mice in a semi-natural setting demonstrated how the hormone oxytocin can amplify aggression as well as friendliness.Here is the study on neurological and psychiatric problems related to Covid that I mentioned in my last post:
I know you are all getting multiple messages a day about Covid 19. I’m sending this along to help build a hypothesis about how neurofeedback could be and probably is protective against the worst ravages of this disease.
A few months ago I recommended that people read Donna Jackson Nakazawa's new book The Angel and The Assassin. This book helps us understand the neuroscience of the brain’s immune system focusing primarily on microglia. If you haven’t read it, let me recommend it again. A cytokine storm is essentially a hyper immune response. A hyper immune response is already linked to many diseases including Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and autism. Might it actually be an agent in most mental illness including PTSD? You probably already know I think so. Our traumatized patients have highly reactive nervous systems. These come with living under threat from earliest childhood. We know from this book and from the ACE study that traumatized children are 10-20% more likely to suffer an autoimmune disease.
The single most important thing we do in neurofeedback for a traumatized person is to reduce fear and the reactivity of their CNS. When we do, we see fewer autoimmune symptoms. If it is the cytokine storm that kills people, it would follow that training toward a more regulated CNS would save lives. That’s what Nakazawa book suggests too. That’s the hypothesis. And it’s likely to help in recovery as well.
I will follow this post with an epidemiological study from the UK looking at the different neurological and psychiatric outcomes related to Covid 19. In fact they may not be that different at all.
Cytokine Storms May Be Fueling Some COVID Deaths
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In many of the sickest patients with COVID-19, it seems the worst damage may be driven by a deranged immune response to the infection, called a cytokine storm, rather than the virus itself.