Risk-taking and interoception in anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by several clusters of symptoms, including the alteration of cognitive and emotional components such as body representation, decision-making and interoception. In order to investigate how anorexia nervosa affects the relationship between these different processes, the present study aims to test two experimental hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that anorexia significantly influences risk-taking processes in the presence of a body-related stimulus, considering that anorexic patients show a defective processing of body stimuli. The second hypothesis implies that anorexia interferes in the typical relationship between interoception and risk-taking, underlying every decision-making process in healthy subjects. To test these postulations, we tested two groups, respectively of forty anorexic subjects and forty healthy subjects, with the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, in which participants were required to inflate a virtual balloon, and a modified version of it, in which they inflated a virtual body. We found that anorexia alters the risk-taking process in presence of body-related stimuli, inducing riskier performances in anorexic patients for the bodily stimulus compared to the healthy controls. Furthermore, we demonstrated that anorexia alters the normative relationship between interception and risk-taking processing. Our results provide new evidence on the impact of anorexia nervosa on risk-taking and interoceptive processing, providing useful information for understanding the mechanisms involved in this pathological condition.