My 4am ramblings

Over the past few months, I have been doing a lot of reading on homebirth, and midwifery care, and there is quite a political movement going on right now (with good reason) to get midwifery care accepted by the medical establishment and funded by the government. This can sometimes make it a little tough to separate fact from rumour when it comes to the actual medical benefits of midwifery care to the mother and baby. One area of research where i'm finding this so is in the research linking the use of pitocin to brain development in the baby later in life.


Pitocin is used in a huge number of births in Canada (and around the world) to induce labour, or to speed it up when docters think it is going too slowly. I had it with Maddy after the epidural effectively stopped my labour. Almost all my friends who I know have had it with their babies, even those who have given birth in what are supposed to be "intervention free" birth centers. It is the synthetic version of a natural hormone produced during labour (for one, its also released during orgasm. Example of a full circle, I think :). Anyway here is the wikipedia article on oxytocin, if anyone cares http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin I can't find anything better right now, but it is 4 am and I can't sleep, so it will have to do.


Pitocin does not cross the blood-brain barrier in adults, and docters have always assumed that it is the same for the baby, but they are starting to realize that a fetus' brain does not work quite the same as ours (duh) and things that don't affect our brain, affect theirs (again, duh). They have no idea, nor have they done much research into what long term effects there may be on brain development by giving the baby HUGE quantities of hormone during birth. One thing they are starting to look at is connection between Autism and pitocin induction/augmentation at birth. Some say there is no connection ( 1, abstract only, sorry, I don't have subscriptions to these journals. I'll have to use my university connections and get them emailed to me sometime when i'm feeling ambitious)
Many/most others agree there is enough evidence to warrant a big-time study (2, 3, 4, 5) which I have yet to find. Here are a few non-scholerly articles I found interesting...
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/autism/article/10168/57071
http://www.autismtoday.com/articles/ATTN_Researchers.htm

Anyway, it makes sense to me. Oxytoxin is known to be a major player in autism once it develops so it seems natural to me that it may play a role in development of this disorder as well. Of course, i'm having a homebirth, so this already puts me on the fringe and makes my ideas "crunchy" (thanks Vicky, for introducing me to that term). It's now 5 am, so i'm going back to bed.

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12757361
2. J Autism Dev Disord. 1993 Sep;23(3):567-9
3. Med Hypotheses. 2004;63(3):456-60
4. Am J Psychiatry 1997; 154:438-9
5. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2004 Jun;61(6):618-27.