14 DAY TRIAL // University of Warwick investigators have determined in a new study that most adolescents who suffer from psychotic episodes or experiences can trace back the origins of these phenomena to frequent bouts of night terrors or frequent nightmares during childhood. This is one of the first studies to correlate these two types of mental manifestations in such a manner.
The study was focused on children under the age of 12, the team writes in the latest issue of the journal Sleep. The research uncovered that kids who experienced daily or very frequent nightmares or night terrors were three and a half times more likely to go on to develop psychotic episodes in adolescence.
The team was also able to determine that night terrors doubled the risks of such an occurrence in early adolescence, independent of the effect triggered by nightmares. Some of the psychotic manifestations the group surveyed included delusions, hallucinations, and interrupted thought processes.
Another interesting conclusion of this research was that children tended to suffer nightmares mostly during rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, the deepest type of sleep. Despite significant interest from scientists, the root cause of why young children commonly experience nightmares remains elusive.
“Younger children, between two and nine years old, who had persistent nightmares reported by parents had up to one and a half times increased risk of developing psychotic experiences,” the team reports.
As opposed to nightmares, night terrors do not occur during REM sleep, but rather during the deep sleep cycles that take place in the first half of the night. These terrors manifest themselves through sheer panic, where a child will wake up screaming and bolt upright, without any recollection of why this happened.
In the morning, kids are often unaware of their activity during the night. Not even those who go through extreme night terror cases, where they move their bodies rapidly and thrash their limbs, do not seem to recall anything the morning after, PsychCentral reports.
“We certainly don’t want to worry parents with this news – three in every four children experience nightmares at this young age. However, nightmares over a prolonged period or bouts of night terrors that persist into adolescence can be an early indicator of something more significant in later life,” says team leader, professor Dieter Wolk.
“The best advice is to try to maintain a lifestyle that promotes healthy sleep hygiene for your child, by creating an environment that allows for the best possible quality of sleep,” comments King's College London investigator Dr. Helen Fisher.
The data used in this study was collected from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which is being conducted in southwestern England, in the United Kingdom.