Role of Oxytocin in Obesity.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This review will summarize the role of the hormone, oxytocin (OT), in the control of energy balance and glucose homeostasis in pre-clinical and clinical models and the role of sex in contributing to these effects.

RECENT FINDINGS: OT reduces intake of chow and highly palatable foods, including sucrose, high fat diet, and chocolate cookies, suggesting that it suppresses homeostatic and hedonic feeding. Chronic administration reduces body weight in diet-induced obese (DIO) rodent models. These effects occur through a selective reduction of fat mass while sparing lean mass. While OT has been found to elicit modest weight loss in a translational nonhuman primate (NHP) model, the effects of intranasal treatment of OT in humans with obesity have been mixed, highlighting the need to optimize dose, dose frequency and duration of administration and the need to develop longer-lasting OT analogs to increase compliance and to minimize off-target effects.