Sleepwalking is a common childhood sleep disorder that usually disappears during adolescence, although it can persist or appear in adulthood.
To assess the prevalence of sleepwalking during childhood, the researchers with the Hopital du Sacre-Coeur de Montreal, Quebec, analyzed sleep data on 1,940 children who were born in Quebec in 1997 and 1998. The study was conducted from 1999 to 2011.
Overall, 29.1 percent of children sleepwalked at some point between the ages of two and 13, according to the study published in the U.S. journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Sleepwalking was relatively infrequent during the preschool years but increased steadily to 13.4 percent by age 10. Its prevalence then remained at about 13 percent until age 13.
The study showed that children's odds of sleepwalking increased based on the sleepwalking history of their parents.
Children with one parent who was a sleepwalker had three times the odds of becoming a sleepwalker compared with children whose parents did not sleepwalk, and children whose parents both had a history of sleepwalking had seven times the odds of becoming a sleepwalker.
By Ruchi Singh
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