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Interoceptive awareness in patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

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ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neuropsychiatric disorder normally diagnosed in childhood and persisting into adulthood in up to two-thirds of the patients. Its core symptoms comprise inattention and hyperactive–impulsive behaviours. Several studies suggest that patients with ADHD show alterations in self-regulation and self-monitoring. So far, it has not been described whether these deficits also affect the awareness of one’s own bodily signals, that is, interoceptive awareness. To investigate possible alterations in interoceptive awareness, 14 adult patients with ADHD and 16 healthy controls performed a heartbeat detection task, in which they had to count their heartbeat without any external help (e.g. visualization on a screen). As an indicator of the individual interoceptive awareness ability, a score based on the comparison between recorded and counted heart beats was calculated. Our results showed that patients with ADHD performed significantly worse on this task than controls, which indicates that they were less aware of internal bodily signals while additionally experiencing deficits in regulating and monitoring their own (overt) behaviours.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Tübingen, Calwerstr. 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Katrin Kutscheidt, Thomas Dresler, Justin Hudak, Beatrix Barth, Thomas Ethofer, Andreas J. Fallgatter & Ann-Christine Ehlis

  2. International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS), Spemannstr. 35, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Katrin Kutscheidt

  3. LEAD Graduate School & Research Network, Walter-Simon-Str. 12, 72072, Tübingen, Germany

    Thomas Dresler, Justin Hudak, Friederike Blume, Andreas J. Fallgatter & Ann-Christine Ehlis

  4. Graduate School of Neural and Behavioral Sciences, University of Tübingen, Österbergstr. 3, 72074, Tübingen, Germany

    Beatrix Barth

  5. Department of Psychology, School Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstr. 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Friederike Blume

  6. Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Otfried-Müller-Str. 25, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Andreas J. Fallgatter

Authors
  1. Katrin Kutscheidt
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  2. Thomas Dresler
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  3. Justin Hudak
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  4. Beatrix Barth
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  6. Thomas Ethofer
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  8. Ann-Christine Ehlis
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Correspondence to Thomas Dresler.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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This article is dedicated to the loving memory of Katrin Kutscheidt, who was killed in a road accident while attending the SFN conference 2015 in Chicago, USA. This article is based on her first unfinished draft which was later finalized by the co-authors.

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Kutscheidt, K., Dresler, T., Hudak, J. et al. Interoceptive awareness in patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD Atten Def Hyp Disord 11, 395–401 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12402-019-00299-3

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