Thank you!

This project was funded by the NIH/NIMH 🙏 The manuscript was led by the outstanding @ch-verdonk.bsky.social and supported by a stellar team of collaborators including @mpwpaulus.bsky.social , @rssmith.bsky.social, Jenny Stewart, Scott Moseman, Ahmad Mayeli, Emily Choquette & Keller Mink.

These findings show how gut-brain science could transform #eatingdisorder care—offering scalable biomarkers for relapse and paving the way for personalized treatments.

Most striking: altered gut perception patterns predicted six-month relapse risk and eating disorder symptom severity. This is the first evidence that gut interoception can forecast relapse in AN. Full details in our new preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

What we found:
AN individuals missed more gut signals despite intact brain/body responses. ❌
Computational models showed biased expectations & reduced precision 🧠
Capsule stimulation also triggered greater hunger increases in AN 🍽

We tested whether gastrointestinal #interoception, the brain’s ability to sense gut signals, might reveal hidden vulnerabilities. Using an ingestible vibrating capsule, we measured behavior, brain activity (EEG), and physiology as participants detected gut sensations.

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is one of the deadliest psychiatric disorders. Despite treatment, relapse rates remain high—and clinicians have no objective tools to track recovery.

In doing so, these efforts may help lay the groundwork for a revised nosology—one rooted not in symptom checklists or clusters, but in empirically grounded models of sensory inference, brain-body interaction, and bodily regulation.

This volume grew from a #ACNP study group convened in 2022. These perspectives offer both novel treatment targets and a path to link latent computational processes with observable symptoms.

Finally, Jungilligens and Perez show how functional neurological disorder may stem from erroneous brain-body integration, highlighting predictive processing as a framework for understanding motor and sensory symptoms, expectation, self-agency, & illness beliefs. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38755514/

Woelk and Garfinkel explore ways that dissociation may reflect a breakdown in interoceptive precision, disrupting body integration by uncoupling body signals from the sense of self and agency. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38755513/

Fani, Fulton & Botzanowski show how trauma can blunt or amplify body signal sensing, highlighting interoception as a target for fostering resilience. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38678141/

Franco-O’ Byrne, Santamaría-García & Ibáñez argue that in frontotemporal dementia, disrupted interoceptive inference may drive autonomic chaos and social-emotional changes, pointing to the need to develop predictive coding–based therapies. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38637414/

Reilly, Brown & Frank link altered taste, touch, vision, and gut sensing to anorexia and bulimia nervosa, highlight knowledge gaps, and proposing neurobiologically-informed strategies for clinical translation. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38730196/