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First-Hand Accounts of Interoceptive Difficulties in Autistic Adults

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Abstract

Interoceptive awareness refers to one’s ability to detect, discriminate, and regulate internal bodily and mental processes. Interoceptive challenges in ASD remain under researched and poorly understood. In this study, we analyzed texts of adults who self-identify as autistic describing their interoceptive challenges. Many individuals described limited awareness of hunger, satiation, or thirst, which contributed to eating disordered behavior in some instances. Others described limited awareness or difficulty understanding affective arousal, pain or illness, and difficulty differentiating benign body signals from signals that represent medical concerns. Findings from this study call for increased research attention on this topic, and a need for valid and objective measures for assessing interoception in ASD.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Hilibrand Foundation and the Hartwell Foundation. We thank Alex Plank for his support in using Wrongplanet.net for our analyses.

Funding

This work was supported by the Hilibrand Foundation and the Hartwell Foundation.

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Contributions

Dominic Trevisan and James McPartland conceptualized and designed the study. Data collection and analysis were performed by Dominic Trevisan and Termara Parker. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Dominic Trevisan and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Dominic A. Trevisan or James C. McPartland.

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Conflict of Interest

James McPartland consults with BlackThorn Therapeutics, has received research funding from Janssen Research and Development, and receives royalties from Guilford Press, Lambert, and Springer. The other authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

Ethics Approval

This study was deemed minimal risk and exempt from oversite by the Yale University Institutional Review Board (Project ID# 2000026330).

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Trevisan, D.A., Parker, T. & McPartland, J.C. First-Hand Accounts of Interoceptive Difficulties in Autistic Adults. J Autism Dev Disord 51, 3483–3491 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04811-x

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