2025 Proffered Presentations
S124: ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC CHANGES IN OXYTOCIN DEFICIENCY AFTER SELLAR SURGERY-A PRELIMINARY STUDY
Bulent Omay, MD; Olufisayo Adeyina; Josephine Levy; Mc Noriel Baldonado; Sertac Ozcan, MD; Ryan Rimmer, MD; Silvio Inzucchi, MD; Helena Rutherford, PhD; Yale School of Medicine
Antidiuretic hormone (ADH) and oxytocin (OT), synthesized in the hypothalamus and released from the posterior pituitary gland, are essential for fluid balance and social behavior regulation, respectively. Tumors located in the hypothalamo-pituitary region (HPL) can disrupt ADH regulation, leading to central diabetes insipidus (CDI). This disruption may also affect OT levels, potentially influencing social-emotional functioning. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) derived from electroencephalography (EEG) provide a way to study the effects of oxytocin modulation on perceptual, attentional, and cognitive processes related to social-emotional functioning. Specifically, the N170 ERP is linked to early facial processing, the P300 to attention allocation, and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) to sustained cognitive processing.
This study explores the effects of CDI on the neural correlates of social-emotional functioning in patients with tumors in the HPL. We hypothesized that CDI patients would display reduced N170, P300, and LPP amplitudes compared to patients without CDI, due to presumed OT dysregulation. The study included two groups: a control group of patients with tumors in the HPL (n=9), and an experimental group of patients with tumors in the HPL leading to CDI (n=9). Scalp-recorded EEG was continuously recorded while participants viewed social-emotional stimuli (infant and adult faces with distress and neutral expressions) and non-social-emotional stimuli (houses).
The findings revealed no significant differences in the N170, P300, and LPP ERPs between the control and experimental groups when viewing the social-emotional and non-social-emotional stimuli (p’s > 0.10). However, medium effect sizes were observed for the N170 (d=0.676) and LPP (d=-0.643), with reduced neural responses observed in the CDI patients relative to patients without CDI. These findings indicate the need for further investigation with larger sample sizes to confirm these trends and to explore the role of OT in CDI and social-emotional functioning. Future studies should also include direct measurements of OT levels to better understand its role in this context.