Clinical Research Directory

The Disrupted Bodily Self of Patients

Some pathological clinical conditions can strongly perturb the link between body and self. One disorder of body representation is the feeling of disownership over body parts, experienced by neurological patients usually after a stroke affecting the right hemisphere. Body disownership and more complex somatoparaphrenic delusions are described as rare in the scientific literature and no clear consensus about their features, brain correlates and recovery mechanisms are on record. Recently, the investigators have discovered that using new sensitive tools it is possible to unveil the presence of covert disownership deficits in patients, who seemed completely unimpaired at the standard assessment. Within a bigger exploratory study of this covert disownership in stroke patients, the aim is to implement a proof-of-concept rehabilitation study, using a multisensory stimulation paradigm, with the hypothesis that a positive remission of disownership will be found and that this treatment can influence both the implicit and explicit features of disownership.