Peptides for brain, mood and anxiety

Two of the four entries here are Russian peptides, registered in Russia and approved nowhere else, and sold online everywhere else as research chemicals.

Their evidence is thin in a specific way. The human studies are small; several compare against another drug rather than against a dummy, and every published anxiety trial of one of the two used a tranquilliser as the comparison; and much of the literature is in Russian and poorly indexed, to the point that when the US regulator reviewed one of them, the single patient study it could read in English found nothing. They sit where they do on the scale rather than lower because people genuinely have been given them and measured — it is the measuring that is thin, not the exposure. The third entry is the instructive one. It is a long-established hospital medicine used in childbirth that became famous online as the love hormone, and when the nasal spray was finally tested properly in 290 autistic children and teenagers over 24 weeks, the social-withdrawal score fell 3.7 points on oxytocin and 3.5 on a dummy spray. The fourth is a food supplement, and its mood evidence is pooled from trials that mostly enrolled people already being treated for a psychiatric illness, which is a different question from whether it lifts an ordinary low mood. An approved medicine and a proven one are not the same claim, and this page holds both kinds.