Assessment on interoceptive awareness on alcohol use and gambling disorders reveals dissociable interoceptive abilities linked to external and internal dependencies: Practical use of Body Perception Questionnaire Very Short Form (BPQ-VSF) in clinical settings.

Abstract

Interoception is one of the pivotal cognitive functions for mechanisms of our body awareness, and malfunction of the interoceptive network is thought to be associated with mental illness, including addiction. Within addictive disorders, substance-based and non-substance-based addictions are known to hold dissociable reward systems. However, little is known about how interoceptive awareness between these addiction sub-types would differ. Subjective interoceptive awareness was assessed among patients with alcohol use disorder (n = 50) who were subsequently hospitalized or remained out-patient and gambling addiction (n = 41) by the Body Awareness component of the Japanese version of the Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ-VSFBA-J) and compared them against healthy control (n = 809). Both addiction groups showed significantly lower BPQ than the control, with no substantial differences between inpatients and outpatients for alcohol samples. Notably, BPQ scores for gambling patients were significantly lower than those for the alcohol group. This evidence may suggest a putative role of interoceptive ability on the severity of behavioral addiction over substance-based addiction.