Individual Differences in Interoceptive Accuracy Are Correlated With Salience Network Connectivity in Older Adults

Abstract

Interoceptive accuracy refers to the ability to consciously perceive the physical condition of the inner body, including one’s heartbeat. In younger adults, interoceptive accuracy is correlated with insular and orbitofrontal cortical connectivity within the salience network (SN). As interoceptive accuracy and insular cortex volume are known to decrease with aging, we aimed to evaluate the correlation between SN connectivity and interoceptive accuracy in older adults. 27 older adults (mean age, 77.29 years, SD = 6.24; 19 female) underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, followed by a heartbeat counting task and neuropsychological test. We evaluated the correlation between interoceptive accuracy and SN connectivity with age, sex, cognitive function, and total gray matter volume as covariates. Region of interest-to-region of interest analyses showed that interoceptive accuracy was positively correlated with the functional connectivity (FC) of the left rostral prefrontal cortex with the right insular, right orbitofrontal, and anterior cingulate cortices [F(6,16) = 4.52, false discovery rate (FDR)-corrected p < 0.05]. Moreover, interoceptive accuracy was negatively correlated to the FC of the left anterior insular cortex with right intra-calcarine and visual medial cortices (F(6,16) = 2.04, FDR-corrected p < 0.10). These findings suggest that coordination between systems, with a positive correlation between left rostral prefrontal cortex and the SN and a negative correlation between left insular cortex and vision-related exteroceptive brain regions, is important for maintaining interoceptive accuracy in older adults.

Neural Correlates of Mild Behavioral Impairment: A Functional Brain Connectivity Study Using Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

“…Informed consent was obtained from all the participants. Of the 43 participants, 27 were included in a previous report [ 25 ]; however, the aim of the previous study, which dealt with interoceptive accuracy, differed from that of the current study.…”

“…Region of interest (ROI)-to-ROI analysis was performed as described in our previous study [ 25 ]. Seeds were selected from within the DMN, SN, and FPCN.…”

“…To identify the FC correlates with the MBI-C score, group-level independent component analysis (ICA) was performed using the CONN toolbox ver.18.b, as in our previous study [ 25 ]. The number of independent components to be estimated was set to 40, and the dimensionality reduction was set to 64.…”

Disentangling interoceptive abilities in alexithymia

“…The main limitation of this study is inevitably linked to the rapid evolution of the definition of interoception, a complex and multi-faceted construct that is undergoing continuous refinement in conceptualization and operationalization. This issue concerns, in particular, the heartbeat perception task—HBP task—that we applied in the current paper to measure interoceptive accuracy by following the previous literature on alexithymia and interoception (Bekrater-Bodmann et al, 2020 ; Herbert et al, 2011 ; Nicholson et al, 2018 ; Scarpazza et al, , 2015 , 2017 ; Shah et al, 2016 ; Ueno et al, 2020 ). Despite its extensive and current use, this task has recently been questioned in terms of its capacity to effectively capture IAcc (Desmedt et al, 2018 ; Ring et al, 2015 ; Zamariola, et al, 2018 ).…”

“…To allow a coherent comparison with the extant literature (Bekrater-Bodmann et al, 2020 ; Herbert et al, 2011 ; Nicholson et al, 2018 ; Scarpazza et al, 2015 , 2017 ; Shah et al, 2016 ; Ueno et al, 2020 ), we used the heartbeat perception task—HBP task—(Schandry, 1981 ) to estimate Interoceptive Accuracy (IAcc) (Garfinkel & Critchley, 2013 ) (see “Discussion” below for benefits and limitations of this task).…”