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Mental health disorders pose a significant challenge to society. The Bayesian perspective on the mind offers unique insights and tools that may help address a variety of mental health conditions. Psychopathological dysfunctions are often connected to altered predictive and active inference processes, in which cognitive and physiological pathogenic beliefs shape the clinical condition and its symptoms. However, there is a lack of general empirical models that integrate cognitive beliefs, physiological experience, and symptoms in healthy and clinical populations. In this study, we examined the relationship between altered predictive mechanisms, interoception, and pathological bodily distortions in healty individuals and in individuals suffering from anorexia nervosa (AN). AN patients (N=15) completed a Virtual Reality Full-Body Illusion along with interoceptive tasks twice: at hospital admission during an acute symptomatological phase (Time 1) and after a 12-week outpatient clinical weight-restoring rehabilitative program (Time 2). Results were compared to a healthy control group. Our findings indicated that higher levels of interoceptive metacognitive awareness were associated with a greater embodiment. However, unlike in healthy participants, AN patients' interoceptive metacognition was linked to embodiment even in multisensory mismatching (asynchronous) conditions. In addition, unlike in healthy participants, higher interoceptive metacognition in AN patients was related to prior abnormal bodily distortions during the acute symptomatology phase. Prediction errors in bodily estimates predicted posterior bodily estimate distortions after the illusion, but while this relationship was only significant in the synchronous condition in healthy participants, there was no significant difference between synchronous and asynchronous conditions in AN patients. Despite the success of the rehabilitation program in restoring some dysfunctional patterns in the AN group, prediction errors and posterior estimate distortions were present at hospital discharge. Our findings suggest that individuals with AN prioritize interoceptive metacognitive processes (i.e., confidence in their own perceived sensations rather than their actual perceptions), disregarding bottom-up bodily inputs in favour of their prior altered top-down beliefs. Moreover, even if the rehabilitative program partially mitigated these alterations, the pathological condition impaired the patients' ability to coherently update their prior erroneous expectations with real-time multisensory bottom-up bodily information, possibly locking the patients in the experience of a distorted prior top-down belief. These results suggest new therapeutic perspectives and introduce the framework of regenerative virtual therapy (RVT), which aims at utilizing technology-based somatic modification techniques to restructure the maladaptive priors underlying a pathological condition.

The Allocentric Lock theory (ALT) suggests that anorexia (AN) may be the outcome of a primary disturbance in the way the body is "experienced" and "remembered". A long tradition of research had proved that emotions can influence the encoding, storing and retrieving of memories. The aim of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of a new virtual reality (VR) paradigm combining the autobiographical recall and the body-swapping techniques in order to unlock the allocentric memory of the body in patients with AN. Seven young women diagnosed with AN following DSM-5 criterion, participated in this study. Before and after the experimental sessions, patients underwent pre-post assessment battery in which cognitive, affective and perceptive variables related with their clinical condition were assessed. The VR-based protocol consisted in four sessions in which patients were immersed in an avatar from an egocentric and an allocentric perspective. The body mass index (BMI) of the avatar was increased throughout the VR sessions: starting from patient's BMI until reaching the normal weight. During each session patients were asked to indicate their real and ideal BMI and to recall negative and positive life events. Patients showed lower negative emotions and body shame at fourth session compared to baseline. Furthermore, patients showed an increase in body satisfaction and an improvement in the accuracy of body perception and body shape. This new VR paradigm might be an effective tool for both assessment and treatment of body perception in AN.

Six monoclonal antibodies (McAb) of the FMC series with specificity for granulocytic or monocytic cells were investigated by means of the immunogold method in combination with the myeloperoxidase reaction at ultrastructural level. This method allowed a precise characterization of the level of myeloid maturation at which the antigens detected by the McAb were expressed and confirmed their specificity for the two myeloid lineages. In addition, it facilitated the identification of granulocytic and monocytic cell components in cases of acute myeloid and chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. Blast cells did not react with any of the McAb used, and the reactivity in more mature cells was parallel to the development of cytoplasmic granules. The pattern of reactivity was similar in normal and leukemic cells, thus suggesting that these McAb could be applied to studies of normal myelopoiesis and to the classification of leukemia.

We have studied, by ultrastructural morphology and immunocytochemistry, the alterations that occur in cells from the HL60 leukaemia cell line and from patients with CGL following incubation in vitro with 1,25(OH) 2 D 3 for 2–5 days. The main morphological changes observed were in the nuclear shape, the development of autophagic vacuoles and the appearance of a population of small granules in the cytoplasm. These changes were associated with a significant reduction in MPO activity and increased expression of membrane antigens detected by the monocyte-specific McAb FMC17 and FMC32, as shown by the IGM at EM level, and a decrease in granulocyte-specific antigens demonstrated by the McAb FMC10. These observations suggest that promyelocytes and myelocytes could transform into monocyte-like cells and that this remodelling of cells was associated with autophagic digestion of cellular structures.