Investigating Interoception in Non-Epileptic Seizures
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigating the role of interoception in non-epileptic seizures.
IRAS ID
203923
Contact name
Charlotte Gaukroger
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 1 months, 16 days
Research summary
Non-epileptic seizures (NES) comprise ‘psychogenic’, epileptic seizure-like events which occur without corresponding abnormal (electrophysiological) brain activity. Despite the fact that NES is extremely costly to the individual and health-care systems, and that the absence of irreversible nervous system pathology makes complete recovery a possibility, effective treatment is lacking.
Given the theorised role of psychological factors, interventions targeting such variables may be most appropriate. However, existing interventions, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), show limited efficacy. This may be because CBT does not target emotional processing, a key maintaining factor for NES. Thus adjunct interventions which target emotional processing may increase efficacy.
However, to enable this, a gap in our understanding of the mechanism of problematic emotional processing in NES must first be addressed. While evidence suggests that NES involves problem emotion recognition (the ability to recognise one’s emotions) and regulation (the methods used to regulate emotion, e.g., supressing emotions, distracting one’s self), emotions are embodied experiences (in other words they also comprise feelings within our body [tension, warmth, sweating]) and we don’t yet know if a problem in detecting changes in bodily states underlies later emotional processing deficits. Thus, to direct future psychological intervention development, we propose to investigate interoception - the processes of receiving and detecting bodily sensations – in NES. We will measure the ability of people with NES to attend to bodily signals using the heart-beat detection task. We will also record emotion recognition and regulation using self-report questionnaires. To investigate whether interoception is affected we will compare data collected from those with NES to a comparison group who do not have NES (recruited through the University of Leeds). To establish whether interoception might underlie emergent emotional processing problems we will investigate relationships between measures of interoception and emotion regulation/recognition.REC name
London - Fulham Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/LO/0836
Date of REC Opinion
17 May 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion