'Love hormone' oxytocin could be used to treat cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's disease progressively degrades a person's memory and cognitive abilities, often resulting in dementia. Amid efforts to find novel treatments for this disease, a recent breakthrough study shows that oxytocin -- the hormone that we commonly know to induce feelings of love and well-being -- can also effectively reverse some of the damage caused by amyloid plaques in the learning and memory center of the brain in an animal model of Alzheimer's.