Sleepwalking may run in families

Children are seven times more likely to sleepwalk if both parents have a history of nocturnal strolls, a Canadian study finds, suggesting that the habit runs in families.

“The findings point to a strong genetic influence on sleepwalking and, to a lesser degree, sleep terrors,” said lead study author Dominique Petit, of the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, at Sacred Heart Hospital in Montreal. “We tend to believe it is one of the genes involved in deep sleep, or slow wave sleep, but it has not been shown yet in humans.”

Petit and colleagues reviewed more than a decade of data on 1,940 children born in Quebec in 1997 and 1998 to assess whether they had sleep terrors as toddlers or sleepwalked as they got older.

Researchers questioned the children’s mothers about sleep terrors and found that about one third of kids experienced these around 1½ years old. By age 5, only about 13 percent of children had sleep terrors, and by age 13, about 5 percent did.

Sleepwalking, however, was less common in younger children and became more prevalent with age, the researchers found. About 13 percent of children aged 10 to 13 were sleepwalkers.

The children who had sleep terrors early in life were more likely to sleepwalk later. About 34 percent of kids who had sleep terrors also became sleepwalkers, compared with about 22 percent of children who never had sleep terrors.

Sleep terrors were slightly more common when children had parents with a history of sleepwalking, the study found.

Parental sleepwalking, however, was much more closely linked to sleepwalking in children.

Children with one parent who sleepwalked were three times more likely to do this than kids who didn’t have a parental history of nocturnal strolls.

Overall, about 25 percent of children without a parental history developed sleepwalking, compared with about 47 percent of kids with one parent who sleepwalked and about 62 percent of children with two parents who sleepwalked.

One weakness of the study is its reliance on parents to report sleep terrors and sleepwalking, rather than physician assessments or sleep studies, the researchers wrote online Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.

REUTERS