Congratulations to Dr. Heck on his new publication in the Journal of Affective Disorders!
The publication by Martina Saltafossi, Detlef Heck, Daniel Kluger and Somogy Varga paper, titled "Common threads: Altered interoceptive processes across affective and anxiety disorders," explores how changes in the way our brain interprets intrinsic sensory signals about the state of the body, including heartbeat and breathing patterns (interoception) may contribute to a wide range of psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety and mood disorders. For example, heightened awareness of heartbeats may increase anxiety, while depressed individuals may show reduced representation of interoceptive signals in their brain activity. Altered interoceptive processing might be a shared feature across multiple disorders which may exist along a continuum with overlapping causes and altered interoception being a common, shared factor. The publication suggests that the brain's response to internal bodily signals plays a major role in mental health, and therapies that target these responses, like controlled breathing exercises or biofeedback, could lead to new treatments for a broad spectrum of anxiety and mood disorders.
Fig. 2. Predictive accounts of interoception. A, Among the key hubs of the interoception brain network are the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), amygdala, thalamus, and anterior insula. The predictive processing model of interoception integrates these structures, mapping them onto second-order processes such as conscious perception and metacognitive control of lower-level sensory information. B, Dysfunctional brain-body coupling manifests in affective disorders as decreased interoceptive sensitivity in heartbeat perception tasks among patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), while patients with anxiety disorders exhibit heightened responsiveness to heartbeats and inspiratory loads (measured as the respiratory-related evoked potential, RREP). C, Schematic hierarchical architecture of neural oscillations within the predictive coding framework. Feed-forward predictions shown in red, feed-back prediction errors in red. Within individual canonical microcircuits (right), specific cell populations encode predictions (deep pyramidal cells), prediction errors (superficial pyramidal cells), or precision (inhibitory interneurons). These units form a natural predictive hierarchy with prediction error cells driving successively faster rhythms as one ascends the hierarchy. Adapted from Brændholt et al. (2023). D, Aberrations in ACC and insular cortex activity contribute to dysfunctional interoceptive predictions. Everyday stimuli are perceived as stressors, which leads to predictions of upregulated physiological responses and a long-term metabolism increase within ACC/insula.
