If
you've been recently rescued from sleepwalking, here's a possible reason why you went zombie —
lack of sleep.
Sleepwalkers should
keep a regular bedtime to avoid unwanted evening strolls, said Antonio Zadra Université
de Montréal, who led a team that recently investigated the link between sleep
loss and sleepwalking. Somnambulism, which affects up to 4 percent of
adults, can cause mental confusion, bouts of amnesia and even physical injuries
in those affected as they wander.
Sleepwalking
is common in kids, but usually they outgrow it, says Dr. Vishesh Kapur,
director of the University of Washington Sleep Disorders Center at Harborview Medical Center.
In the February 2008 issue of the journal Annals of Neurology, Zadra, Mathieu
Pilon and Jacques Montplaisir explain how they evaluated 40 suspected
sleepwalkers. Each was referred to the Sleep Research Centre at Sacré-Coeur Hospital, a Université de Montréal
teaching hospital, between August 2003 and March 2007.
“Our study found that
sleep
deprivation can precipitate sleepwalking in predisposed individuals,” Zadra
said.
Zzzzzzzzzz...
Subjects who took
part in the study agreed to have their baseline sleep patterns monitored during
an initial all-night assessment. During a subsequent visit, patients were kept
awake for the entire evening and remained under constant supervision.
Recovery sleep was
allowed the next morning after patients had been awake for 25 hours. Subjects
were videotaped during each sleep period as the research team evaluated their
behavior, which ranged from playing with bed sheets to trying to jump over the
bed rails. Subjects were evaluated on a three-point scale based on the
complexity of their actions.
During baseline
sleep, only half of patients exhibited some 32 of these behaviors. During
recovery sleep, that figure rose to 90 percent. The research was supported by
the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Sleepwalking is "a
disorder of arousal, a kind of mixed state of being," Kapur said. There
are three states of being in the world of sleep researchers — wakefulness,
non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and REM sleep (most associated with dreams).
Sleepwalking is a mixture of wakefulness and non-REM sleep, he said.
Some sort of arousal
or disruption to sleep can also trigger sleepwalking, Kapur said. So people
with sleep apnea
(an interruption of breathing — snoring is commonly caused by apnea) sometimes
sleepwalk, because apnea can create a state where someone is in between non-REM
sleep and wakefulness.
Genes to jammies
Family
genetics can also predispose one to sleepwalking, Kapur said, but a lot is
still unknown about why some people sleepwalk and others do not.
"We know that
sleepwalking happens more often in children than in adults, and the
predisposing factor there might be the fact that kids have a lot more of slow-wave
sleep, a deep non-REM sleep where sleepwalking often starts," Kapur said.
One of the main
concerns with sleep walking is injury to oneself or others. When there is any
issue of complex behavior that has someone leaving the home or potentially
doing activities that could hurt them, they should be evaluated and treated,
Kapur said.
Treatments for sleep
walking include better sleep hygiene, keeping a regular sleep schedule (to
avoid sleep deprivation) and avoiding an excess of alcohol and caffeine or
maybe any at all, particularly in the evening, he said. For extreme cases,
medication may be prescribed.
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