Opioids And Social Interaction Theory
In 1979, Dr. Jaak Panksepp proposed the Opioid Excess Theory, the idea that the social symptoms in autistic children are the result of an imbalance in the opioid peptide levels in the brain. Dr. Kalle Reichelt was a leading researcher of this theory and published many papers on how the levels of peptides in urine samples of autistic individuals differed from the norm. Due to Reichelt’s research, it has been proposed that opioid antagonists could be used as treatments for autism. Unfortunately, a more recent study failed to find a statistically significant difference between the peptide levels in urine samples of individuals with autism compared to the samples of individuals without. (Hunter, 2007).
Treatments using opioid antagonists have been …show more content…
Yu. Phoenix Xu was studying the relationship between opioids and social behavior in mice and part of his thesis included a ‘social interaction experiment’ which the Social Reciprocity/Opioid project later based itself on.
The 1987 paper ‘Brain Opioids and Autism: An Updated Analysis of Possible Linkages’ by Dr. Tony Sahley and Dr. Jaak Panksepp hypothesized that “autism, at least partially, represents a disruptive overactivation of hypersensitization of neurohormone systems in the brain, such as brain opioids” (Sahley, 1987). Sahley and Panksepp experimented with the idea that decreasing the opioid activity in the brain could have a positive affect on the social aspects of autism.
In an attempt to study the same concept but in mice instead, The Social Reciprocity/Opioid Experiment came to be. For the experiment, 48 mice (24 pairs) were obtained. A rectangular box with a barrier in the middle (splitting the box in two sections) was designed. Two mice would be placed in the box, one in each section. The barrier separating the two mice would have holes in it large enough for mice to be able to smell eachother, however not touch one another. The floor of the box was marked with two lines, one on each side of the barrier, equidistant from
Treatments using opioid antagonists have been …show more content…
Yu. Phoenix Xu was studying the relationship between opioids and social behavior in mice and part of his thesis included a ‘social interaction experiment’ which the Social Reciprocity/Opioid project later based itself on.
The 1987 paper ‘Brain Opioids and Autism: An Updated Analysis of Possible Linkages’ by Dr. Tony Sahley and Dr. Jaak Panksepp hypothesized that “autism, at least partially, represents a disruptive overactivation of hypersensitization of neurohormone systems in the brain, such as brain opioids” (Sahley, 1987). Sahley and Panksepp experimented with the idea that decreasing the opioid activity in the brain could have a positive affect on the social aspects of autism.
In an attempt to study the same concept but in mice instead, The Social Reciprocity/Opioid Experiment came to be. For the experiment, 48 mice (24 pairs) were obtained. A rectangular box with a barrier in the middle (splitting the box in two sections) was designed. Two mice would be placed in the box, one in each section. The barrier separating the two mice would have holes in it large enough for mice to be able to smell eachother, however not touch one another. The floor of the box was marked with two lines, one on each side of the barrier, equidistant from