Journal Article

8185 Interoception and metacognition anorexia nervosa

Bobou Marina, Koukoutsakis Athanasios, Konstantakopoulos, George, Mavromara Liza, Fotopoulou Aikaterini, Gonidakis Fragiskos

2025

Overview

Patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) typically hold altered beliefs about their body that they struggle to update. These can vary from sensory, local beliefs about how full their stomach feels to global, prospective beliefs about how much they can trust their own body and its signals. Clinical questionnaire studies have provided ample evidence on the role of such beliefs in the onset, maintenance, and treatment of AN, yet the parameters that contribute to the formation and maintenance of such beliefs have not been identified. Here, I present a series of studies with independent samples of women at the acute AN (total N = 106) and post-acute AN state (N = 113), compared to matched healthy controls (N = 220) in which we aim to (1) assess interoceptive and exteroceptive perception and metacognitive beliefs using state-of-the-art methods and statistical approaches; (2) study how patients update these beliefs following feedback or contextual changes; (3) develop and validate a novel neurocomputational approach to determine the parameters that may influence belief formation and updating in these domains; (4) relate some of these parameters to clinical symptoms such as insight into illness and (5) translate these insights to the development and testing of the efficacy of a novel, interdisciplinary (psychophysiological) therapeutic module in a sub-clinical RCT study with 100 individuals with low interoception awareness, stratified for subclinical disordered eating.

• Publisher: BMJ Publishing Group LTD
• Subject: Anorexia / Metacognition