Participants with AN showed lower perceptual accuracy and higher miss rates relative to healthy comparators
WEDNESDAY, July 1, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Females with anorexia nervosa (AN) have disrupted gastrointestinal interoception compared with healthy comparators, according to a study published online June 17 in JAMA Psychiatry.
Charles Verdonk, M.D., Ph.D., from the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and colleagues examined markers of gastrointestinal interoception in weight-restored individuals with AN. Participants were females with weight-restored restrictive AN and age- and sex-matched healthy comparators (62 and 57 participants, respectively). A vibrating capsule that delivered counterbalanced blocks of normal- and enhanced-intensity gut stimulation was ingested by all participants. Interoceptive accuracy, prior beliefs, interoceptive precision, learning rates, gastric-evoked potentials (GEPs), and hunger were experimental-session measures.
The researchers found that participants with AN showed lower perceptual accuracy and higher miss rates compared with healthy comparators. There were stronger prior expectations that capsule vibrations would not be present, greater shifts in interoceptive precision between blocks, and learning asymmetries in the AN group. No difference was seen by group in GEP amplitudes, but they were correlated with accuracy and learning in AN. Greater hunger increases were induced by capsule stimulation in AN. At follow-up, initial priors, response bias, and stomach unpleasantness predicted relapse (odds ratios, 3.82, 5.37, and 5.73, respectively); the severity of eating disorder symptoms was predicted by miss rate, difference in interoceptive precision, and initial priors (β = 1.05, 5.84, and −2.99, respectively).
“People with anorexia nervosa do not simply ignore signals from the body,” senior author Sahib Khalsa, M.D., Ph.D., also from the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, said in a statement. “Rather, their nervous system may process gut sensations differently, making those signals harder to detect, trust and learn from.”
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