For most, the behavior continues when they are away from home
"I got a huge knot in my head once from ramming into a door because I was in such a hurry," said the former diplomat. She said she routinely asked her husband to hide food they brought into their hotel room when they traveled. He told her he often awoke in the middle of the night to find her frantically searching for 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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Because there is no diagnostic test for sleep eating, experts who treat it say they usually rely on the results of a complete medical and psychiatric history as well as a sleep study and the results of a sleep log and food diary compiled by the patient.
Sometimes treatment is relatively simple, according to Emsellem. Some people who starved themselves during the day to compensate for their nightly episodes found that if they ate a balanced daytime diet the problem abated.
Minnesota's Mahowald said that in about 50 percent of cases, medications will reduce or eliminate sleep eating episodes, particularly if another medical problem such as apnea or narcolepsy is uncovered and treated. But in some cases, the problem proves to be more intractable and drugs don't work.
In these situations, said Hopkins's Neubauer, doctors sometimes experiment with behavioral strategies, with varying degrees of success.
One sleep eater who was afraid of snakes put a large rubber one on her kitchen table every night, which usually sent her straight back to bed. A patient of Neubauer's said she now eats cottage cheese and pineapple when she gets up rather than the high-calorie foods she used to gobble, and has lost 20 pounds in the past two years.Neubauer has on occasion suggested a novel form of aversive conditioning: telling patients to mail a small cash donation to a cause they passionately oppose the morning after an episode.
Ed and Nancy Weber appear to have found a successful treatment.
For the past six weeks Weber has been taking Provigil, a drug to regulate sleep that was prescribed by his neurologist. He said he feels better, the narcolepsy is under control and his sleep eating has stopped.
Nancy Weber said she believes the quality of her husband's formerly restless sleep also has improved. Now that she no longer worries that he might burn down their house, domestic tranquility has been restored.
"I'm just so relieved it's not happening anymore," she said. •
