Stomach-brain coupling indexes a dimensional signature of mental health.

Visceral rhythms orchestrate the physiological states underlying human emotion. Chronic aberrations in these brain-body interactions are implicated in a broad spectrum of mental health disorders. However, the relationship of gastric-brain coupling to affective symptoms remains poorly understood. We investigated the relationship between this novel interoceptive axis and mental health in 243 participants, using a cross validated machine learning approach. We find that increased fronto-parietal brain coupling to the gastric rhythm indexes a dimensional signature of worse mental health, spanning anxiety, depression, stress, and well-being. Control analyses confirm the specificity of these interactions to the gastric-brain axis. Our study proposes coupling between the stomach and brain as a factor in mental health and offers potential new targets for interventions remediating aberrant brain-body coupling.