Recent theories posit that physiological signals contribute to corporeal awareness, the basic feeling that one has a body (body ownership) that acts according to one’s will (body agency) and occupies a specific position (body location). Combining physiological recordings with immersive virtual reality, we found that an ecological mapping of real respiratory patterns onto a virtual body illusorily changes corporeal awareness. This new way of inducing a respiratory bodily illusion, called “embreathment,” revealed that breathing is almost as important as visual appearance for inducing body ownership and more important than any other cue for body agency. These effects were moderated by individual levels of interoception, as assessed through a standard heartbeat-counting task and a new “pneumoception” task. By showing that respiratory, visual, and spatial signals exert a specific and weighted influence on the fundamental feeling that one is an embodied agent, we pave the way for a comprehensive hierarchical model of corporeal awareness. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Our body is the only object we sense from the inside; however, it is unclear how much inner physiology contributes to the global sensation of having a body and controlling it. We combine respiration recordings with immersive virtual reality and find that making a virtual body breathe like the real body gives an illusory sense of ownership and agency over the avatar, elucidating the role of a key physiological process like breathing in corporeal awareness.
The introduction of COVID-19 vaccines within a very short time represents a triumph of modern medicine. However, patients with cancer were mostly excluded from the registrative phase III trials of COVID-19 vaccine and only small clinical studies evaluating the immunogenicity of the vaccines in this frail population have been available. In this large prospective cohort study including 816 patients, we assessed the reliable impact of COVID-19 vaccination in patients with cancer in comparison with a matched-control group of health-care workers. This clinical issue is very relevant since cancer patients are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19-related complications and death and thus are considered as high priority subjects for COVID-19 vaccination. Moreover, we explored clinical characteristics which could potentially affect the immunogenicity of the vaccine to formulate helpful evidence-based recommendation for a safe and effective vaccination.Research.
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