What is it about?
Women with endometriosis suffer from chronic pelvic pain, but does this affect how well they sense internal body signals? We tested their awareness of heartbeats, stomach fullness, and bladder urgency. Unlike healthy women, they showed reduced accuracy in detecting bladder and stomach signals, but not heartbeats, suggesting domain-specific interoceptive impairments.
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Why is it important?
Our findings suggest that women with endometriosis may focus intensely on pain and discomfort in their pelvic region, yet struggle to detect normal internal signals. This mismatch could contribute to chronic pain and misinterpretation of body signals. A better understanding of how women with endometriosis experience their bodily signals could help to improve the diagnosis, thanks to the novel, non-invasive bladder interoceptive accuracy task, and potentially guide new treatments focusing on body awareness and pain perception.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a deeply rewarding experience, as it brought together my interests in neuroscience, women's health, and the often-overlooked role of interoception in chronic pain. Developing a new, non-invasive way to measure bladder awareness—something so central yet rarely studied—felt like a genuine breakthrough. I hope this work not only advances scientific understanding but also helps give voice to the lived experiences of women with endometriosis, encouraging more research that listens to the body in all its complexity.
Chiara Cantoni
Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Impaired gastric and urinary but preserved cardiac interoception in women with endometriosis, PLOS One, May 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0322865.
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