CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Interoception, the sensing of visceral-body signals, involves an interplay between neural and autonomic mechanisms. Studies under the brain-centered approach characterizing embodied cognition research have focused on patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders. However, virtually no attention has been paid to the neural correlates of interoception in patients with cardiac and autonomic disruptions. Here, we bridge this gap examining multidimensional neural markers of interoception in hypertensive disease (HTN). We included only HTN patients with no cognitive impairment (as shown by neuropsychological tests), no brain atrophy (as assessed with voxel based morphometry), and no white matter alterations (as evidenced by diffusion tensor imaging analysis). In particular, we evaluated interoceptive domains through (i) a behavioral heartbeat detection (HBD) task; (ii) measures of the heart-evoked potential (HEP), an electrophysiological cortical signature of attention to cardiac signals; and (iii) neuroimaging recordings (MRI and fMRI) to evaluate anatomical and functional connectivity properties of key interoceptive regions. Relative to controls, HTN patients exhibited poorer interoceptive accuracy in the HBD task, reduced HEP amplitude modulation, and aberrant functional connectivity in key interoceptive areas (insula and anterior cingulate cortex). These findings constitute a novel approach to understand the embodied foundations of interception, evidencing that subtle abnormalities of the peripheral cardiac system directly impact on neurocognitive markers of body sensing.