Sleepwalking Disorder

The act of getting up and walking around while asleep.
Sleepwalking is most common in children, who usually outgrow it by their teens.
Sleepwalking usually occurs one to two hours after falling asleep at night. Rarely, it may involve unusual behaviors, such as climbing out a window or urinating in a closet.
Often, sleepwalking is a random, harmless event. Treatment may be needed if it occurs often or causes injury. Medications and hypnosis may help.

 

Cluster Number:
Wiki Number: PW207
Diagnosis: Sleepwalking Disorder
US Patients:
World Patients:
Sex Ratio:
Age Onset: 5% in children; 1.5% in adults in a study had been sleep-walking once in the past 12 months
Brain Area: differently metabolized serotonin
Symptoms: Wakeful activities during slow-wave sleep from talking to eating to driving a car-little or no memory later; 30 seconds to 30 minutes
Progression: occurs early in the sleep-cycle; only once per night, often accompanied by night-terrors especially in children
Causes: sometimes schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, migraines or Tourette syndrome, Parkinson’s, may be genetic or overly tired
Medications: antidepressants, serotonergic agents, antipsychotics ; Sleepwalking has sometimes been an effective defense against crimes.
Therapies: hypnosis, relaxation training,conditioning therapies. For safety, have ground floor bedroom, “alarm” the door, no weapons.

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4 CURRENT ARTICLES
FROM PUBMED

The world-wide medical research
reports chosen for each diagnosis 

Clicking each title opens the
PubMed article’s summary-abstract.

  • Tourette Disorder and Sleep
    by Justin L Blaty on January 15, 2022

    Healthy sleep is of utmost importance for growth, development, and overall health. Strong evidence shows that sleep is affected negatively in patients and particularly children with Tourette Disorder (TD). There is also a frequent association of TD with ADHD which alone has negative effects on sleep and cumulatively worsens the associated sleep findings. The most consistent polysomnographic findings in patients with TD is decreased total sleep time, lower sleep efficiency and an elevated arousal...

  • Self-reported developmental changes in the frequency and characteristics of somnambulistic and sleep terror episodes in chronic sleepwalkers
    by Narges Kalantari on January 6, 2022

    CONCLUSION: Our study demonstrates that in chronic sleepwalkers, sleep mentation associated with somnambulistic episodes increases with age while episodes worsen in frequency and severity from childhood to adulthood. These findings add to the limited literature in the field and provide valuable insights into how key clinical characteristics of somnambulism evolve across the lifespan.

  • Comorbid parasomnias in narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia: more REM than NREM parasomnias
    by Smaranda Leu-Semenescu on January 5, 2022

    CONCLUSIONS: In patients with central disorders of hypersomnolence, comorbid NREM parasomnias (except SRED) are rare and do not worsen sleepiness. In contrast, REM parasomnias are prevalent (especially in NT1) and associated with male sex, disrupted nighttime sleep, depressive symptoms and antidepressant use.

  • Sleep Disorder
    by Bibek Karna on January 1, 2022

    Sleep is a complex biological process. It is a reversible state of unconsciousness in which there are reduced metabolism and motor activity. There are two different kinds of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Most young adults first enter NREM sleep from the drowsy state. NREM sleep (dreamless sleep) is further divided into three stages (previous guidelines included 4 stages, however, stages 3 and 4 are now subsumed under stage 3). The first stage N1 is the lightest...