Key result
This paper describes a novel methodological protocol combining laboratory stress tasks and naturalistic wearable sensor data to quantify autonomic nervous system dysregulation across the eating disorder spectrum.
Why the study?
Altered autonomic nervous system functioning relates to eating disorder phenomenology, but the direction and significance of alterations lack agreement due to spectrum variability.
Do autonomic nervous system tonic variations and phasic activations differ between patients with eating disorders and healthy controls?
Do autonomic nervous system tonic variations and phasic activations differ between patients with eating disorders and healthy controls?
This paper outlines a novel methodological protocol combining wearable sensors and ecological momentary assessment to investigate autonomic nervous system dysregulation across the eating disorder spectrum.
Hypothesis-generating for stress-probe ANS testing in eating disorders; leaves open diagnostic or therapeutic utility.
The phenomenology of Eating Disorders (ED) relates with altered functioning of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). The lack of agreement in what comes to the direction and significance of such alterations is possibly due to the variability in the ED spectrum. As the stress response system is an integral part of the ANS, we propose to investigate ANS tonic variations and phasic activations in response to stressors. We hypothesize that, while using stress as a test probe, characteristic ANS dysregulations in ED may be found when considering several physiological signals measured over time, and weighted by the individual psychological profiles. In this article we describe a novel methodological approach to investigate this hypothesis with the aim of providing further clarification on the ED spectrum conceptualization. The proposed methodology has been designed to be easily integrated in clinical practice and, eventually, in daily life. The population under observation includes both patients in treatment for ED, and matched controls. The study session has the duration of 1 day, including: (1) the administration of a stress task in a controlled environment and (2) naturalistic data collection. The stress task is designed to elicit both mentally and physically driven ANS activation. The naturalistic component intends to illustrate the psychophysiology in everyday life. We use wearable devices to continuously and non-invasively measure bio-signals related to ANS functioning. This information is complemented with psychometric information from validated stress and ED scales and ecological momentary assessments. The protocol has received ethical approval and has been implemented in practice, currently accounting for 37 patients (out of 120) and 16 controls (out of 60). Ongoing work focus on the definition and implementation of a data processing pipeline to quantitatively test our hypothesis, both standard statistical methods and more exploratory machine learning approaches will be considered.
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Simões‐Capela et al. (2019) studied Eating Disorders (n=53). Multimodal stress task and naturalistic autonomic sensing vs. Healthy matched controls was evaluated on Autonomic nervous system tonic variations and phasic activations (HR, HRV, skin conductance, temperature). This paper describes a novel methodological protocol combining laboratory stress tasks and naturalistic wearable sensor data to quantify autonomic nervous system dysregulation across the eating disorder spectrum.
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