Early last summer, bizarre and disturbing things began happening during the night in the Silver Spring home of Ed and Nancy Weber.
One evening Ed Weber got up from a nap on the sofa, polished off a half-gallon of chocolate chip ice cream, then dozed off again. He woke up an hour later and went looking for the ice cream, summoning his wife to the kitchen and insisting, to her astonishment, that someone else must have eaten it.
Neurologist John F. Cochran, who directs the sleep lab at Inova Alexandria Hospital, treats some patients who exhibit symptoms of nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder.
(Susan Biddle - The Washington Post)
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Days earlier Nancy Weber had discovered peanut butter smeared on the refrigerator door and blobs of grape jelly under their kitchen table.
But what scared her most was walking into the kitchen one morning after the ice cream episode and realizing that her husband of 42 years had turned on a gas burner in the middle of the night and gone back to bed.
"It felt like I was living in the Twilight Zone," she said, remembering her husband's vehement denials. "I absolutely believed Ed didn't remember what he was doing."
Ed Weber, 66, said he had no memory of the incidents. "I thought she was trying to gaslight me," he recalled. "I really didn't believe I'd done these things."
It took neurologist John W. Cochran, armed with the results of a battery of tests, to convince him otherwise.
Cochran, who directs the sleep lab at Inova Alexandria Hospital, told the couple that Ed Weber's strange behavior was the result of a little-known problem called nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NSRED), a hybrid condition that bears the characteristics of an eating disorder and a sleep problem.
First officially described in 1991, NSRED, which is often referred to as sleep eating, is listed in the International Classification of Sleep Disorders as a parasomnia, a category of arousal disorders that includes sleepwalking.
An estimated 5 to 10 percent of Americans sleepwalk, but there are no reliable estimates of how many people get up and eat in the middle of the night when they are neither hungry nor fully awake. The majority of sleep eaters, experts say, do not have a daytime eating disorder such as bulimia or binge eating, nor was their problem triggered by rigid dieting. Nearly three-quarters have a history of sleepwalking.
