Sleepwalking: Sleepwalkers Feel No Pain While Asleep, Despite Injuries

Sleepwalkers are unlikely to experience pain even if they suffer an injury while sleepwalking, according to a recent study.

Researchers found that while 10 sleepwalkers in the study woke immediately due to pain from an injury, 37 sleepwalkers experienced no pain during the episode--feeling the pain either later in the night when they woke up or in the morning when they woke up.

During the study, researchers conducted a cross-sectional study of 100 healthy control subjects and 100 patients with a diagnosis of sleepwalking that included 55 males and 45 females. The sleepwalkers in the study were a median age of 30. Daytime pain complaints were evaluated by a clinician along with self-report questionnaires, which assessed lifetime headache frequency and headache characteristics. Forty-seven sleepwalkers reported having experienced at least one injurious sleepwalking episode.

What's surprising is that while sleepwalkers were unlikely to experience pain while sleepwalking, they were close to 4 times more likely than the controls in the study to have a history of headaches and 10 times more likely to report a history of migraines, the researchers say. However, 79 percent of the sleepwalkers with at least one previous sleepwalking episode that involved an injury experienced no pain during the episode even though they were injured.

"Our results may help to understand the mechanisms of the sleepwalking episodes," said principal investigator Dr. Regis Lopez, psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist at Hospital Gui-de-Chauliac in Montpellier, France, in a news release. "We hypothesize that a dissociate state of arousal may modify the components of sleep-wake behavior, consciousness, and also pain perception."

The study is published in the journal SLEEP.

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