Having a spat? Try some hormone spray

A little squirt of a hormone that relaxes women during childbirth and breastfeeding helped lower stress in men and women who were quarreling, a researcher has reported.

Levels of a stress hormone called cortisol dropped significantly in the men and women given oxytocin, said Beate Ditzen, a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta. She reported her results Tuesday at the International Congress of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Though they are nowhere close to developing a marital harmony drug, researchers think they may be on the trail of a way to help battle stress and, possibly, reduce conflict.

Ditzen, then at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and colleagues at the University of Fribourg tested 50 heterosexual couples, asking them to discuss a subject that they often disagreed about.

Half the couples got a nasal spray of a medical preparation of oxytocin, used to help induce labor in women, and half got a dummy spray.

Fighting in laboratory conditions is probably artificial, Ditzen acknowledged, but she said the changes in cortisol levels were worth following up.