Sleepwalking in Adults More Common Than Thought



HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 14, 2012 (HealthDay News) -- Sleepwalkers on TV and in movies are often played for drama or laughs, but the phenomenon is surprisingly common in American households, a large, new study suggests.


"It's probably more common than we realize, which doesn't surprise me," said Dr. B. Tucker Woodson, professor and chief of the division of sleep medicine at Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who wasn't involved in the study. "As clinicians we often see the cases in which it's a problem, so if the occasional sleepwalking episode is not causing any problems, it tends not to be something people seek medical attention for."

The study is published May 15 in the journal Neurology.



"When you have one episode of sleepwalking per month at minimum, you are disturbed by the disorder, no doubt," Ohayon said. "More than once a month is a lot of episodes in a year. It could be harmful for them ... because they don't have the normal reactions. So it could be a big accident coming, but happily that's very rare."


Ohayon cautioned that it's not clear whether the psychiatric conditions themselves or drugs used to treat them were responsible for the heightened sleepwalking incidence.

"An association doesn't mean you have a causality link," he said. "It means at maximum, the SSRIs are triggering sleepwalking, but are not the cause. That is clear."

Participants using over-the-counter sleeping pills had a higher chance of reporting sleepwalking at least twice a month, while gender and race weren't associated with the disorder and it seemed to lessen with age.

Ohayon and Woodson agreed that longitudinal research needs to be done that can examine the long-term factors contributing to sleepwalking, which wasn't possible in this cross-sectional study.

"Sleepwalking is a really interesting phenomenon in that it represents the brain in different states -- part of the brain, in a sense, is awake, and part is asleep," Woodson said. "We're learning that other disorders may have similar brain activity . . . with mixed states of wake and sleep. I don't think we understand them all that well. Most are not associated with serious medical consequences, but obviously sometimes they can be."

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about sleepwalking.

SOURCES: Maurice Ohayon, M.D., D.Sc., Ph.D., professor, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif.; B. Tucker Woodson, M.D., professor, and chief, division of sleep medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; May 15, 2012, Neurology

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