As a young teen, Lynne Romano recalls awakening to find turned-over jars of ravioli sauce dripping down her dresser or mustard-smeared potato chips scattered around her room. How they got there was a total mystery to her. “Then my mother started getting mad at me for messing up the kitchen at night,” she says. “I had no idea I was getting up in my sleep and eating.”
The problem worsened with age. “I’ve woken up with candy wrappers all over my bedroom floor,” says Romano, now a 51-year-old mother of two living in Andover, Massachusetts. “I’ve found plates on the floor that I have to be careful not to step on when I get up.”
Except for the trail of crumbs and gooey messes that confront her in the morning—and a nauseous feeling from overeating—Romano has no memory of her nightly foraging. Once she awoke in the morning to a throbbing pain in her wrist. “I opened my eyes to see what was wrong, and I was burned,” she says. “I’d been cooking in my sleep!”
Romano suffers from a specialized form of sleepwalking called nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NSRED), a condition first recognized in 1991. It is a cross between a sleeping disturbance and an eating disorder. Unlike other parasomnias, NSRED often resembles a serious addiction, with sufferers frequently getting up several times a night. In this somnolent state they may scarf down voluminous quantities of food—and balloon up in weight.
Except for the trail of crumbs and gooey messes in the morning—and a nauseous feeling—Romano has no memory of her nightly foraging
For now, medical science has little to offer those whose lives are ruled by this inexplicable condition. But new research holds out hope that drugs developed to treat other neurological problems—notably epilepsy—could rein in the compulsive and blind drive to eat at the core of the disorder.
Sleep eating is often confused with the more common disorder known as night eating syndrome, in which individuals consume the bulk of their daily calories after 6 p.m. Night eating syndrome is most prevalent in people with mood disturbances and involves a disruption in the circadian rhythms that govern appetite, shifting the urge to eat into the nocturnal hours. But unlike sleep eaters, night eaters are aware of what they’re doing, gorging themselves before even going to bed. If they snack in the middle of the night, they are awake and fully conscious of their actions.
By contrast, sleep eaters have minimal or no awareness, although “they usually do manage to find a way back to bed,” says Helene Emsellem, medical director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The disorder is also rare: Questionnaire responses suggest that the problem affects from 0.5 to 1 percent of the population. But that’s a sketchy estimate based on a small sample, cautions John Winkelman, who conducted the survey as medical director of the Sleep HealthCenters at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Because sufferers are often ashamed, many cases may go unreported.
