Differential effects of sleep deprivation on sleepwalking: Role of demographic and clinical profiles

Abstract

BackgroundAlthough sleepwalking is one of the most prevalent and potentially injurious of the NREM parasomnias, it is still diagnosed primarily based on the patient's clinical history. Early pilot work suggested that sleep deprivation protocols could help obtain a polysomnographically-based (PSG) diagnosis of sleepwalking, but larger studies remain lacking. MethodsWe compared baseline PSG recordings with those obtained after 25hrs of sleep deprivation in a cohort of 124 consecutively assessed adult sleepwalkers. ResultsWhen compared to baseline recordings, post-sleep deprivation PSG assessments resulted in nearly twice as many somnambulistic episodes being recorded in the laboratory and significantly increased the proportion of patients (from 48 % to 63 %) experiencing at least one lab-based episode. Moreover, while 17 % of patients experienced a sleepwalking event exclusively during recovery sleep, only 2 % of patients did so solely at baseline. Sleep deprivation had similar facilitating effects on patents’ somnambulistic events regardless of age of onset and positive versus negative family history for sleepwalking. Younger age and higher home episode frequency both predicted a positive response to sleep deprivation. A separate group of 17 patients with comorbid sleep disorders showed a similar increase in their proportion experiencing at least one episode during recovery sleep. ConclusionThe results from this large series of sleepwalkers provide strong support for the use of sleep deprivation in facilitating the occurrence of somnambulistic events in the sleep laboratory.