Measured body sensing loses its mental-health link as a pesticide signal fades after adjustment
Cardiac and respiratory tasks found no relation between objective body-sensing performance and symptoms. In ECHO, the prenatal organophosphate association lost significance after full adjustment across 3,339 mother-child pairs.
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Cardiac and respiratory tasks find no symptom link
A study published in Nature Mental Health tested the relation between performance in sensing internal bodily signals and mental-health symptoms with direct tasks. The cardiac task included 456 participants and the respiratory task included 245. Using hierarchical Bayesian models for sensitivity, precision and metacognition, the team reported that objective performance was largely unrelated to depression, anxiety, ADHD and autism traits. Self-reported body awareness did move with symptoms. The authors interpret that second association as reflecting people's beliefs about their bodies more than accurate sensing of the signals.[1]
Self-report and direct tasks capture different things
The researchers say the result from the cardiac and respiratory tasks does not make bodily sensing irrelevant to mental health. Resting-state laboratory tasks and general questionnaires may miss the signals that matter in daily life. It is also difficult to treat the cardiac and respiratory measures as interchangeable expressions of one body-sensing faculty: the study leaves open the possibility that interoception is organ-specific. The central finding therefore separates the awareness people report from the sensing accuracy measured in the tasks, rather than treating the two as the same variable.[1]
The organophosphate association disappears after full adjustment
The ECHO study reported in JAMA Pediatrics pooled 3,339 mother-child pairs from 20 sites. An inverse association between prenatal organophosphate metabolites and autism-related traits measured at a mean age of 6.4 weakened and lost statistical significance when the models were fully adjusted. The result held in sex-stratified models, quantile and logistic regressions, sensitivity analyses and after dietary adjustment. Lead author Haleigh M. Cavalier stressed that the finding does not show that these pesticides are safe. The team describes exposure in the cohort as relatively low and does not rule out danger at higher exposures or among more vulnerable groups.[2]
