14 DAY TRIAL // Experts at the Stanford University School of Medicine have recently found an interesting association between a number of psychiatric disorders and sleepwalking. The research is very important, since the latter can affect roughly 1.1 million people in the United States alone, according to statistics.
That is the equivalent of 3.6 percent of the adult population. The psychiatric disorders that the team looked at in this study included anxiety and depression. Details of the study appear in the May 15 issue of the medical journal Neurology, which is edited by the American Academy of Neurology.
One of the main implications of the new work is that sleepwalking may be more prevalent in the general population than scientists first calculated. This was revealed in a statement by Maurice Ohayon, MD, DSc, PhD, the lead author of the science paper.
He holds an appointment as a professor of psychiatric and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. The expert says that sleepwalking is cataloged as a condition implying arousal from non-REM sleep. Rapid-eye movement sleep occurs when we dream, and are very relaxed.
The condition has severe influences on sufferers' psychosocial functioning, and can impair their quality of life significantly. In addition to endangering themselves, patients can also get very tired the next day.
The exact causes of sleepwalking are not known. Some hypotheses suggest that certain medication and drug use patterns may trigger the condition, while others say that psychological and psychiatric disorders are most likely to blame, PsychCentral reports.
“Apart from a study we did 10 years ago in the European general population, where we reported a prevalence of 2 percent of sleepwalking, there are nearly no data regarding the prevalence of nocturnal wanderings in the adult general population,” the Stanford team wrote in the new paper.
“In the United States, the only prevalence rate was published 30 years ago,” they add. The new figures were produced from a study of 19,136 individuals from 15 states. The lifetime prevalence of sleepwalking was found to be around 29 percent, the team says.
“There is no doubt an association between nocturnal wanderings and certain conditions, but we don’t know the direction of the causality. Are the medical conditions provoking sleepwalking, or is it vice versa? Or perhaps it’s the treatment that is responsible,” Ohayon concludes.