Objective: This study aimed to provide a BMI-adjusted meta-analytical calculation of blood leptin levels across different eating disorders (EDs) including anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), binge eating disorder (BED), recovered EDs, and healthy controls (HCs). The goal was to understand BMI-independent leptin alterations and their potential as biomarkers.
Method: PubMed and ClinicalTrials.
The human brain is tightly connected to the individual's environment and its input dynamics. How the dynamics of periodic environmental stimuli influence neural activity and subsequent behavior via neural entrainment or alignment is not fully clear yet, though. This study explores how periodic environmental stimuli influence neural activity and behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain and breathing activities are closely related. However, the exact neurophysiological mechanisms that couple the brain and breathing to stimuli in the external environment are not yet agreed upon. Our data support that synchronization and dynamic attunement are two key mechanisms that couple local brain activity and breathing to external periodic stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnxiety is a pervasive emotional state where, phenomenologically, subjects often report changes in their experience of time and space. However, a systematic and quantified examination of time and space experience in terms of a self-report scale is still missing which eventually could also be used for clinical differential diagnosis. Based on historical phenomenological literature and patients' subjective reports, we here introduce, in a first step, the Scale for Time and Space Experience of Anxiety (STEA) in a smaller sample of 19 subjects with anxiety disorders and, in a second step, validate its shorter clinical version (cSTEA) in a larger sample of 48 anxiety subjects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntuitive eating (IE) is a non-dieting approach that promotes listening to internal cues of hunger and satiety, rather than adhering to external dietary restrictions aimed at weight loss. However, the role of IE in dieting behaviors related to weight-loss approaches is still unclear. To address this issue, the aim of this study was to compare IE levels between dieting and non-dieting individuals, exploring the relationship between IE and dieting-related psychological and physical factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Health Literacy (HL) consists in all the skills and knowledges used by people to understand and seek health-related information. Inadequate levels of HL substantially affect many different aspects of health. The primary aim of the present study was to assess levels of HL in female patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN), compared with matched control subjects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Disordered eating and body image concerns are increasingly common among adolescents, possibly representing the underpinning of eating disorders (EDs). This cross-sectional observational study aimed at investigating the relationship between various patterns of sports involvement or inactivity, and the abovementioned psychopathological dimensions.
Methods: All adolescents attending their 3rd-5th Italian grade in a single high school reported their sociodemographic and anthropometric data, their weekly sports involvement, and filled the Eating Disorders Examination Questionnaire 6.
An emerging body of research has evidenced the negative influence of using and being exposed to social networking sites (SNSs) on body image. Furthermore, it has been postulated that SNS use might be related with onset and persistence of eating disorders (EDs) psychopathology. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the complex interplay between problematic Instagram use (PIU) (conceptualized as a potential behavioral addiction comprising withdrawal, conflict, tolerance, salience, mood modification and relapse) and ED psychopathology, by means of an explanatory structural equation model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by a diminished capacity in perceiving the physiological correlates of interoceptive sensations, namely bodily self-consciousness. Given the neural division of self-processing into interoceptive-, exteroceptive- and mental-self, we hypothesize neural deficits in the interoceptive-processing regions in AN.
Methods: To prove this, we reviewed resting state (rs), task and rest-task studies in AN literature.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by social anxiety/fear, self-attention, and interoception. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies demonstrate increased activity during symptom-sensitive tasks in regions of the default-mode network (DMN), amygdala (AMG), and salience network (SN). What is the source of this task-unspecific symptom-sensitive hyperactivity in DMN? We address this question by probing SAD resting state (rs) changes in DMN including their relation to other regions as possible source of task-unspecific hyperactivity in the same regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current international crisis situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is having a strong psychological impact on our subjectivities. We are constantly threatened by the danger of i) being infected, ii) infecting other people, and (iii) by the loss of social relation. Departing from these premises, we here aim to investigate the psychological and neurodynamics of this complex phenomenon.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF