In a study on somnambulism where the sleepwalkers experienced at least one instance of injury, 79 percent of the sleepwalkers continued sleeping unaware of their injury.
Interestingly, the research team from the University of Montpellier and the Hopital Gui-de-Chauliac in France found that while sleepwalkers may not experience any pain in case of injuries while sleepwalking, they are at large risk of experiencing headaches and migraines when they are awake.
In their findings, which are published in the journal Sleep, the team relates, "Our results highlight the clinical enigma of pain in sleepwalking patients with complaints of frequent chronic pain, migraine, and headache during wakefulness but who report retrospectively experience of analgesia during severe parasomnia episodes, suggesting a relationship between dissociated brain activity and nociceptive dysregulation."
The researchers suggest that during sleepwalk, the sleeper experiences an impairment of the sensory neuron so that no signal is sent to the spinal cord or the brain and therefrom no sensation of pain.
Research principal Dr Regis Lopez says, "Our most surprising result was the lack of pain perception during the sleepwalking episodes."
"We report here, for the first time, an analgesia phenomenon associated with sleepwalking."
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine states that 4% of adults are affected by sleepwalking. Sleepwalking occurs when the sleepwalker is about to wake up from deep sleep but does not complete the process of waking up.
On observing 55 adult females and 45 adult males with an average age of 30 and who have histories of sleepwalking, 10 participants woke up immediately after getting injured while sleepwalking. In all, 37 reported to have felt no pain while sleepwalking and only became aware of their injury when they eventually woke up.
Examples of these injuries are a broken leg that resulted when a patient fell off the roof after climbing in sleep and severe fractures when another patient jumped out of a third-storey window. In both cases, neither patient were aware of their injury prior to waking up much later. The sleepwalker's safety is, naturally, always a big concern.
Dr. Lopez says, "We hypothesise that a dissociate state of arousal may modify the components of sleep-wake behaviour, consciousness, and also pain perception."
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