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A Retrospective Study of Sleepwalking in 22 Patients:
Clinical and Polysomnographic Findings
Turan Atay, M.D. and Ismet Karacan, M.D. D.Sc.
We evaluated the recordings of 22 patients between 11 and 42 years of age who pre-sented
with the complaint of sleepwalking (SW) accompanied by other nocturnal behav-iors
ranging from mumbling, talking or screaming to more complex automatisms. None of
the patients had a history of epileptic seizures. All patients had a history of another para-somnia;
seven (33 %) reported family members with a history of parasomnia. More than
one third of the patients started sleepwalking after age 10 years and almost two thirds
had been sleepwalking for at least 15 years. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI) indicated psychopathology in nine patients; but there was usually no
close association between SW and any psychopathology, and the treatment of one con-dition
did not improve the other condition. In 12 patients, all-night polysomnographic
investigations showed epileptiform abnormalities mostly recorded from temporal areas;
four of them also had abnormal clinical EEGs. None of the parasomnia episodes in the
sleep laboratory was associated with abnormal EEG activity. Anticonvulsant therapy
reduced or completely eliminated the episodes in 11 patients with abnormal EEGs. Most
of the patients in this study were either adolescents or young adults, but they exhibited
the clinical characteristics of both classic (childhood) and adulthood somnambulism.
There were also similarities with "episodic nocturnal wanderings" first described by
Pedley and Guilleminault in 1977. (Sleep and Hypnosis 2000;5:255-262)
| Keywords: parasomnia, sleepwalking, episodic nocturnal wanderings, abnormal EEG, epilepsy, anti-convulsant
therapy, polysomnography |
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