Obsession for love, a sickness
By Harender Raj Gautam

SONG writers have long crooned that love is insane. But scientists now have an explanation to corroborate this belief and they have termed obsession for love as an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

Psychiatrists now say that passion’s thrills do indeed resemble OCDs angst, both in outward habits and the brain’s inner chemistry. Their conclusions might just explain why love makes you do such utterly foolish and extreme things.

It all started in 1990, when Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa in Italy, began looking for biochemical explanations for OCD. One chief suspect was the neurotransmitter serotonin—a chemical that has a soothing effect on the brain. Low levels of serotonin in brain have been linked to aggression, depression and anxiety. So Marazziti set out to measure the level of serotonin in people with OCD. Since tracking the chemical inside the brain is tricky, she settled on a simple technique.

She calculated the amount of serotonin in platelets — tiny cells that are easily retrieved from an ordinary blood sample. In blood platelets, serotonin plays a totally different role — aiding clotting — but its level increases or decreases in much the same way as it does in the brain. This means that scientists can gauge roughly how much serotonin is present in your head from the levels of related proteins in platelets.

Marazziti found evidence that serotonin levels were low in people with OCD. To find out whether people in love pass through the OCD syndrome, Marazziti’s team pinned advertisements around the University of Pisa medical school asking for students who had fallen in love within the past six months and who had remained obsessively preoccupied by thoughts of their new love for at least four hours every day but who had not yet celebrated the relationship with sex.

They wanted to find Romeos and Juliets whose fresh passion had neither been hormonally jumbled by sex or dulled by time. Seventeen women and three men, with an average age of 24, signed up. Separately, the scientists recruited 20 patients who met the basic criteria for OCD and another 20 free from the grip of either love or psychiatric disorder.

While the ‘normal’ students had the usual level of serotonin, both the OCD and ‘in-love’ participants had about 40 per cent less chemical. To confirm their findings that the serotonin level plummets solely during love’s first flush — and not later on — the researchers re-tested six of the original 20 ‘in-love’ students a year later. Sure enough, the students’ serotonin levels had bounced back to normal as the feelings of love had now been dulled by time and hence they were no longer obsessed with their partners. Though Marazziti’s new study is preliminary, she advocates that this research is just a first step to understand the biochemical markers of love.

Hagop Akiskal, a psychiatrist at the University of California in San Diego and one of Marazziti’s co-authors on the new study, explains that inheritors of a gene that encodes the D4 dopamine receptor may seek thrills in love. He explains that "great romantics" are people suffering from cyclothymia, a bipolar disorder somewhat like manic depression, that brings alternating periods of intense excitement and gloom.

According to Akiskal’s research, people with cyclothymia fall in love during happy times, often indiscriminately. The euphoria inevitably fades, as severe melancholy sets in, sometimes leading to suicidal depression for the person with cyclothymia and potential danger for his or her love interest. It is passion’s dark side and researchers would dearly love to understand the chemistry behind it.

In future, scientists would certainly like to unravel this biological mystery with animal models. But how do you make a rabbit or a rat fall in love? Geoffery Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at University College, London, notes that while many species mate, scientists have no clue how many actually felt romantic yearnings. But, then love comes full circle, at least in the animal kingdom. Scientists regard prairie voles — fat little rodents rather like squirrels — as nature’s most significant creatures.

Amid surging dopamine levels, voles pledge lifelong monogamy to a partner. Lovestruck humans can learn from these simples creatures. The findings of the present studies — that obsession for love is a sickness — is a good step forward to understand and unravel the biological mystery of love and its effect on human behaviour.