Recent News and Articles on the Keywords: sleepwalking + sleep + 0.24  Related to the article below (Last Update: 8/5/2008)

Good Night?s Sleep Eludes Many in US WebMD - "What people don't realize is these medications can pose a host of side effects, including daytime drowsiness, even bizarre behavior like sleep-walking, ... Consumer Reports Survey: 44% of Americans Are 'Problem Sleepers ... MarketWatch - Aug 4, 2008 "What people don't realize is these medications can pose a host of side effects including daytime drowsiness, even bizarre behavior like sleep-walking, ... Channel 4 News Sleep Walking Channel 4 News, UK - Aug 4, 2008 Apparently, Darnell wandered into the Hell bedroom in the early hours of this morning - but he was nowhere to be seen when the housemates from Hell woke up. ... Pharmalot Sleeping Pills And An Eye-Opening Survey Pharmalot, NJ - ... 7 percent of respondents who took a sleeping pill during the previous month reported bizarre and dangerous behavior such as sleepwalking, sleep driving, ... Helping those who can't sleep Hamilton Spectator, Canada - Aug 2, 2008 We think about sleep eating, where people get hungry, go looking for food. Others have sleep terror, sleep talking and sleep walking ... and sometimes ... If a person doesn?t sleep for three days, does he/she become ... Scienceline, NY - Aug 3, 2008 Mahowald says sleep deprivation can trigger sleepwalking episodes. While sleep-deprived people still have fully functional brain activity, sleepwalkers only ... AskMen We help you understand sleepwalking AskMen - Jul 31, 2008 Otherwise coolly known as somnambulism or noctamublism, sleepwalking is a disorder characterized by complicated activity that takes place during sleep or ... 5 Things You Must Know About Sleep LiveScience.com, NY - Aug 1, 2008 ... snoring, sleepwalking and so forth. For instance, insomnia is said to be the most common sleep disorder, but these dissatisfying sleep experiences only ... Jury acquits on automatism New Zealand Herald, New Zealand - Aug 4, 2008 It has been used to acquit people who commit crimes while sleep walking or suffering a hypoglycaemic episode or epileptic fit. Cricketing anecdotes 'Caught & Told' IndiaPost.com, CA - Aug 3, 2008 Even die-hard fans of the game would not know that master blaster Tendulkar has a peculiar habit - sleep walking? and well, talking in sleep too! ...

Eyes Wide Open: The Sleepwalking Story

You might picture a sleepwalker as someone walking Frankenstein-like across the room with their arms stretched out in front of them. But the real-life sleepwalker is much more likely to wander about their house doing ordinary everyday activities, such as getting dressed and undressed, albeit with an eerily glassy look in their eyes.

Sleepwalking, however, can be unhealthy or hazardous to the sleepwalker and others, especially if the sleepwalker engages in complicated activities like eating, cooking or driving. Some sleepwalkers even act out violet dreams. Carlos Schenck, MD, a senior staff psychiatrist at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis who has produced an educational DVD called "Sleep Runners: The Stories Behind Everyday Parasomnias." has many years of experience treating people with sleepwalking, which is a type of parasomnia. Healthology recently talked with Dr. Schneck about sleepwalking in adults and children, and how sleepwalkers and family members can learn to manage a condition that can lead to some unusual and sometimes bizarre nocturnal activity.

What is sleepwalking?
It’s a series of complex behaviors that are usually initiated during partial awakenings from sleep. People will walk around with an altered state of consciousness and impaired judgment. Various investigators have found that sleepwalkers have a lot of disruption of slow-wave sleep, the deepest stage of sleep, which occurs in the first half or first third of the night. And with each disruption, there is a vulnerability to sleepwalking.

At what age is sleepwalking most common?
It’s particularly common in childhood. In fact, the peak prevalence in childhood is 17 percent between the ages of 8 and 12. Most children will outgrow sleepwalking before or with puberty, although you can have the onset of sleepwalking after puberty. Up to 4 percent of adults are sleepwalkers.

What causes sleepwalking in children?
The vast majority of cases in children seem to have genetic basis. For example, if one parent is affected by sleepwalking, the chances are 45 percent that one of the children will also be affected by sleepwalking. If both parents sleepwalk, then there is a 60 percent probability that one of the children will also sleepwalk. Sleep walking in children is considered a relatively common developmental phenomenon.

What causes sleepwalking in adults?
In adulthood, in addition to genetics, various conditions can predispose someone to sleepwalking, such as hyperthyroidism, migraine headaches, head injury and encephalitis. Obstructive sleep apnea, which is increasingly common because of the obesity epidemic in our country, is also a risk factor for sleepwalking.

What can trigger a sleepwalking episode?
Current research has indicated that the number one risk factor—and this is quite relevant to our lifestyle in America today—is sleep deprivation. Number two on the list would be stress, either physical stress or emotional stress. In children, fever can trigger a sleepwalking episode if the child is already predisposed.

Another common precipitant is travel across time zones or sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings. A child with sleepwalking who has a sleepover at a friend’s house may be at increased risk for sleepwalking because this is an unfamiliar environment. Adults with sleepwalking know that if they travel, they had better sleep in a first floor motel or hotel room. They may be at risk for opening a window and going out of a window.

Alcohol use or abuse can trigger episodes. People are more likely to sleepwalk even after one drink in the evening, if they are genetically predisposed. So if you’re a sleepwalker, you really want to separate any alcohol use from sleep onset by several hours at least.

Other possible triggers include spicy or fatty foods and the introduction of a medication or a change in a medication.

What do people look like when they are sleepwalking?
Their eyes are open, pupils dilated. They look like they have a glassy stare to their eyes. They are really not with it. They often wander around in a confused way.

Do people recall their sleepwalking episodes?
In childhood, they don’t. In adulthood there is variable recall. Sometimes there is detailed recall, including recall of dreaming while sleepwalking.

What kind of activities might they engage in?
Most of the time, it’s benign behavior, such as rearranging furniture, taking clothing out of the closet and depositing it around the room. I had a patient who took a head of lettuce from the refrigerator and put it in the bathroom.

At times, people will walk out of the house. If you live in a cold climate and you walk out of the house in the middle of winter barefoot and without a coat, you could be at great risk for exposure. Or you become vulnerable to being struck by an automobile. We have had patients who walked into a lake, so they could have drowned.

We published an article in the Journal of Sleep in 1995 about a man who had a very long history of sleepwalking and night terrors. One night at the age of 25, he bolted from bed in his underwear and he ran right through a screen window. He drove about 5 or 10 miles to his parent’s home, pounded on their door. It was only when they opened the door and started talking to him that he snapped out of it and realized that he had been sleepwalking.

Will people eat while they sleepwalk?
People with sleep-related eating disorder will eat at inappropriate times during the night with partial awareness or complete unawareness. Eating may begin sporadically, but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a nightly phenomenon. They will eat simple carbs and high fat foods, the kind of foods that you really want to avoid if you want a healthy diet. The main problem is progressive weight gain.

Are people ever violent when they sleepwalk?
A surprising number of adults engage in aggressive or violent sleepwalking that can pose a risk to themselves or to their bed partners. In adults, mixed sleepwalking and sleep terrors are very common. So these people will often begin their episode with a sleep terror, which is another type of parasomnia, which will then progress into a violent sleepwalking episode.

With adult sleepwalking and sleep terrors, there is a surprisingly high percent of dreaming associated with their activity. If they perceive that there is an intruder near the bed, they may punch at the intruder, when in fact they are hitting their spouse.

How should a family member handle a sleepwalker?
Very gently redirect them back to bed. The last thing you want to do is talk loudly to them or shake them to wake them up. That can almost always aggravate their agitation. You want to very calmly, in a whisper, tell them to go back to bed and maybe touch them very lightly to turn them around, heading towards bed.

Do you treat everyone who sleepwalks?
No, that’s a very good point. With childhood sleepwalking, provided the child is not endangering himself or herself, you want to reassure the parents that this is a relatively common developmental phenomenon, and they should outgrow it by puberty, but to keep an eye on whether the child is trying to leave the house or opening windows.

If it occurs frequently, parents may want to use a door alarm or a special type of lock to prevent the child from wandering around the house.

With adolescent or adult sleepwalking, you and your doctor have to make a determination about the frequency and the severity. If you have infrequent sleepwalking episodes that are not dangerous to yourself or others, but you are in an intimate relationship and are embarrassed about the occasional episode of sleepwalking, then you really have to play detective to find out if there are triggers.

How do you treat problematic sleepwalking?
Find out whether you are sleep deprived, how well you are able to manage stress, if you have a late evening workout that can really rev up your system. But if you do make lifestyle changes and sleepwalking is still a problem then there are other things you can do. If the person is not endangering himself or others, we then teach them self-hypnosis. That could take the form of yoga, meditation, relaxation tapes or a more formal self-hypnosis technique they learn from a psychologist or other trained professional, which they will then practice on their own every night. That can be very helpful in controlling or eliminating sleepwalking.

For people who are endangering themselves, have very high frequency sleepwalking or who want protection when traveling, medication in the benzodiazepine family—clonazepam, lorazepam, alprazolam—taken maybe 30 to 45 minutes before bedtime works quite well in the vast majority of patients.

How can people make their homes safe for sleepwalking?
You really want to make your bedside surroundings as safe as possible. You want to keep your night table out of arm’s length. Even if a person with a sleepwalking history does not sleepwalk, very often they will fling their arms. If you hit a corner of a night table or the wall, that could be a nasty bruise. And put any kind of weapon in as secure a place as possible. How do you treat sleep-related eating disorder?
In people with sleep-related eating disorder, there need to be studies in the sleep lab to look for sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome, which are also associated with sleep-related eating. If they have sleep apnea, we treat them with a nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine and more often than not, that will also control the sleep-related eating disorder. If you treat restless leg syndrome patients with a dopamine medication—that’s the standard treatment for restless leg syndrome—usually that will also control the sleep-related eating

For people who don’t have obstructive sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome, you could try Topamax (topiramate), an anticonvulsant medication that has potent appetite-suppressing properties.

Anyone who has sleep-related eating disorder who is taking the sleeping pill Ambien should immediately talk to their prescribing physician and try to get on another sleeping pill; that might be the solution.

What is your advice to people who sleepwalk?
First of all, play detective and try to correlate an episode of sleepwalking with any factor from the preceding day. Was there a particular stressor or did you eat spicy foods or high fat foods? Have you been sleep deprived? Have you started a new medication for a medical disorder or have you had a dose increase or decrease of a medication? Any change in your day-to-day life that can correlate with an episode of sleepwalking can be very helpful. Always try to maintain a normal sleep schedule and get enough sleep at night. If you still have a problem, make your bedroom as safe as possible, get a door alarm. If it’s still a problem, you had better talk to your physician and maybe get referred to a sleep disorder center. People can die sleepwalking and even endanger or kill a loved one. You want to avoid tragic consequences.