A way to assess health status by stomach rumbling has been found

Researchers at University College London have developed a noninvasive method for assessing gastrointestinal interoception — a person's ability to perceive internal signals from the digestive system. To do this, volunteers were asked to determine which of two recordings of rumbling was a live broadcast of their own stomach "right now." The work has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Interoception — loosely referred to as the "sixth sense" — is responsible for perceiving bodily states: hunger, thirst, heartbeat, bladder fullness, and emotions. A deficit in gut interoception is associated with overeating, eating disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, and anxiety; excessive sensitivity can trigger panic attacks. Existing measurement methods — inflating balloons inside digestive organs or swallowing electronic capsules — are uncomfortable for volunteers and difficult to scale.

In the new experiment, 45 healthy adults came to the laboratory on an empty stomach (3 hours of fasting). A digital stethoscope was attached to each person's abdomen, recording borborygmi — sounds of intestinal activity. Participants were presented with two 15-second audio clips: one was a live broadcast of the sounds of their own gut at that moment, and the other was a recording made several minutes earlier. The participants' task was to guess which of the recordings corresponded to the real-time rumbling. The test was repeated under three conditions: fasting, after carbonated water, and after a high-protein shake.

On average, guessing accuracy was 56–60% — only slightly above chance level (50%). However, what matters is not the average accuracy but the individual differences: one in five participants performed significantly better than chance while fasting, and after consuming liquid or food — one in four. Accuracy correlated with the participants' confidence in their responses.

The authors emphasize that the method is open-access and free of charge. It allows measuring gut interoception without discomfort and can be used to study eating disorders, anxiety, and depression — conditions in which the perception of internal signals is often disrupted.