Most sleep eaters find ways to subvert these strategies, doctors say, because the compulsion to eat is so powerful.
Let's Eat
Sleep eaters typically have little difficulty falling asleep, said David Neubauer, associate director of the Sleep Disorder Center at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, but their rest is disturbed by repeated arousals.
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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Eating episodes tend to occur within 60 to 90 minutes after falling asleep, during the shift from deep sleep to a lighter stage, Neubauer said. "At this point they fall into this kind of limbo state," he noted.
Most sleep eating episodes last about 10 to 15 minutes, he added, and eating is usually the sole focus of activity. But experts don't know what causes the awakenings or the drive to eat.
"We don't know what the underlying physiology of the disorder is," said Harvard's Winkelman. Some scientists have suggested that levels of leptin, a hormone that regulates metabolism, and ghrelin, a hormone that triggers eating may be involved.
Neubauer and others note that sleep eating, like sleepwalking, may be familial. The former diplomat -- who ate in her sleep every night for 30 years -- said she learned only recently that her late mother had suffered with the same problem for decades.
"She told me it started to recede when she got into her seventies," the woman said of her mother. "I was kind of relieved to learn she'd done it, too, because then it seemed like maybe I'd inherited some kind of genetic link."
Friends or relatives who encounter sleep eaters describe their glassy-eyed look and mumbling speech and say most are intent on getting to the kitchen as quickly as possible.
"People can become quite irritable and sometimes belligerent if they're interrupted," Winkelman said.
Neubauer said that one of his patients broke the doorframe getting out of her bedroom; her mother had locked the door at her request.
