The Interoceptive Awareness Questionnaire (IAQ) differentiates between and within patient groups with stress-related bodily complaints versus healthy controls

Abstract

Aims: We developed the Interoceptive Awareness Questionnaire (IAQ) to respond to two concerns related to existing assessment tools for body awareness:(a) the lack of a clear distinction between sensations and symptoms, and (b) the limited number of interoceptive response channels. The IAQ is a 19-item multi-modal self-report measure assessing awareness of interoceptive stimuli. Factor analysis performed on a large healthy sample (N=1366) revealed two subscales with good psychometric properties:(F1) awareness of sensations, referring to sensory information from within the body, and (F2) awareness of symptoms, denoting experiences of bodily information in a negative manner. Here we aimed to explore 1) whether patients who experience stress -related physical symptoms in daily life differ in scores on the IAQ compared with healthy controls, and 2) whether there are differences between patient groups with regard to the IAQ. Methods: IAQ data were compared in 6 datasets:(1) panic disorder (N=27) vs overstrain (N=34) vs chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)/fibromyalgia(FM; N=23); (2) healthy (N=20) vs CFS/FM (N=18) vs irritable bowel syndrome(IBS;N=14); (3) healthy(N=30) vs CFS/FM(N=28) vs overstrain(N=30) vs panic disorder(N=29) vs burn-out(N=29); (4) healthy(N=24) vs IBS(N=26); (5) healthy(N=25) vs medically unexplained dyspnea(MUD; N=29); (6) healthy (N=41) vs CFS/FM(N=80). Results: Overall, patients scored higher on IAQ than healthy controls, more specifically on the Sensations subscale(F1). Within patient groups, panic patients had higher scores on the Symptom subscale (F2) compared with other patient groups. Conclusions: Whereas awareness of sensations differentiates between patients and healthy controls, awareness of symptoms differs between patient groups. The results may help to further disentangle adaptive and maladaptive aspects of interoceptive awareness.