Sleep experts
have long known about sleep paralysis, but research in the latest issue
of the medical journal Neurology offers them a better idea of how common
it is and what the risk factors might be. According to a new study, roughly
6 percent of all people have had at least one episode of sleep paralysis,
while slightly less than 1 percent have at least one episode a week.
Sleep expert Dr. Maurice Ohayon and colleagues came up with those figures
by asking 8,100 people in Germany and Italy about their sleep habits. Ohayon,
a researcher the University of Montreal, says he would expect the prevalence
rate to be about the same in other countries, too.
Few people report the problem to a doctor. “Probably, the fears of being
considered mentally ill are more powerful than the will to know what was
happening,” he says.
While some hallucinations may be powerful enough to trigger anxiety or depression,
the study should reassure people who worry that their sleep paralysis indicates
a brain tumor. Ohayon said that in most cases, sleep paralysis is not linked
to neurological disease.
What’s
Risky?
While 6 percent of the population may sound small, Dr. Michael Thorpy
of Montefiore Medical Center in New York City says that’s fairly sizable
for a sleep disorder. Sleep apnea, when breathing stops during sleep,
occurs in only 4 percent of adult males. Narcolepsy registers a scant
.05 percent.
In addition to finding out how common sleep paralysis is, Ohayon discovered
that the problem is about five times more likely to hit people taking
anti-anxiety drugs such as Xanax and Valium. People on these medications
may want to try a different prescription as way of treating the sleep
paralysis.
For others, the problem is often tied to sleep deprivation, a consequence
of being overtired. The study also found that sleep paralysis often appears
as a secondary problem for people with sleep-robbing mental illnesses
like severe anxiety and bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive
psychosis.
Sleep paralysis strikes during the transition between dreaming sleep -
called REM sleep for its telltale rapid eye movements and being fully
awake. During REM sleep, experts say, your body keeps you safe from acting
out on your dreams by temporarily paralyzing you.
The
Truth is Out There
Sometimes, your brain doesn’t fully switch off those dreams - or the paralysis
- when you wake up. That would explain the “frozen” feeling and hallucinations
associated with sleep paralysis, says Dr. Max Hirshkowitz, director of
the Sleep Disorders Center at the Veterans Administration Medical Center
in Houston.
The effect lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, but it
feels like forever.
“The biggest effect is they’re scared to death, and if you add an hallucination,
it’s even worse,” he says. “The very first thing to do (in treatment)
is let them know it’s not going to kill them. They’re not going crazy,
they’re not going to be permanently paralyzed.”
Hirshkowitz says he suspects that many people who claim to have been abducted
by aliens were really just suffering from hallucinatory sleep paralysis,
since the “alien” descriptions are so similar to what’s described by patients.
In an era before Roswell and The X-Files, he says, people would have said
they were being visited by spirits or dead ancestors.
Pieces of this Article from ABC News |
