Interoception in pathological health anxiety

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Cognitive-behavioral models suggest health anxiety stems from misinterpreting benign bodily sensations.
• Abnormalities in interoception, the sense of the body's internal state, may underlie this preoccupation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate interoception abnormalities in pathological health anxiety (PHA).
• To differentiate interoceptive processing in PHA from general anxiety disorders.

Main Methods:

• A multimethod approach was used, assessing interoception via heartbeat tracking and a signal-detection task for nonspecific skin conductance fluctuations (NSCFs).
• Participants included patients with PHA (n=51) and healthy controls (n=56).

Main Results:

• Patients with PHA showed a more liberal interoceptive response bias for NSCFs compared to controls.
• Higher interoceptive sensitivity for NSCFs was observed in patients with comorbid anxiety disorders.
• This heightened sensitivity was not specific to PHA when comorbid anxiety was accounted for.

Conclusions:

• Heightened interoceptive sensitivity may be linked to anxiety disorders generally, rather than health anxiety specifically.
• Biased interoceptive processing appears more specific to pathological health anxiety.
• Further research with larger samples and multimethod interoception assessment is needed.