Not enough sleep does not only cause physical exhaustion. It may also lead to involuntary walking — while a person is still fast asleep. This is one of the results of a research team that researched the impact of sleep problems in adults and how it can be connected with cases of sleepwalking.
April 1, 2008, Montreal – If you’d like sleepwalkers to roll around the whole night, deprive them of sleep. It may seem funny, but a Canadian analysis of 40 sleepwalkers indicates that when sleep-deprived, people have a greater tendency to sleepwalk.
Based to University of Montreal’s Dr. Antonio Zadra and his colleagues, the research supports recommendations for sleepwalkers to “keep a regular sleep cycle and avoid sleep deprivation symptom.”
While sleep may seem like a steady state, it actually consists of 5 stages that cycle all over the night. There are certainly 5 stages of sleep including the REM (rapid eye movement) stage. A complete sleep cycle takes about 90 to 100 minutes and a regular sleep consists of 4 to 5 complete sleep cycles.
In Zadra’s research, sleepwalkers spent a night at a laboratory where they were videotaped. Experts observed their actions while they were asleep. Most sleepwalkers don’t actually sleepwalk each night.
The experts discovered that most of the volunteers in the analysis had actually sleepwalked. A lot of them did so more than once that night, for a total of 32 sleepwalking episodes. On the following day, the volunteers were kept awake for 25 hours straight to find out how sleep deprivation would impacts the sleepwalkers.
When they went to bed in the morning, they were all tired and were trying to get sleep at an uncommon time. The experts noted that after staying awake for 25 hours, the volunteers revealed many various sleeping habits compare to the night before. Throughout their catch-up sleep period, 36 people sleepwalked for a total of 92 sleepwalking episodes.
This result introduced by Zadra and his colleagues to conclude that sleep deprivation may inspire sleepwalking in sleepwalkers. The results may help in diagnosing and curing people for sleepwalking.
While this analysis did not include a comparison group of those who have never sleepwalked, in the past work of Zadra’s team, however, they found out that healthy people with no history of sleepwalking weren’t more likely to sleepwalk when sleep deprived.
Posted under Sleep Deprivation Symptoms
This post was written by editor on February 25, 2012


