Kales A

Sleepwalking and Night Terrors in Adulthood Clinical EEG Findings

This is the first controlled study to show a lack of relation between a positive history of sleepwalking or night terrors in adults and daytime EEG abnormalities. We recorded a standard clinical EEG on 35 adult sleepwalkers (SW), 35 adult night terror patients (NT), and 35 control subjects (CS). Three subjects in the SW group showed abnormalities: one during both the resting record (RR) and hyperventilation (HV), and two only during HV. None in the NT group showed any EEG abnormality. Two control subjects showed abnormalities of both RR and HV, and a third only during HV. The number of abnormal EEGs within each group was limited, and the three groups did not significantly differ from one another. Our results suggest that the daytime clinical EEG is of limited value in evaluating adults with the primary complaint of sleepwalking or night terrors. However, further all-night sleep EEG studies utilizing clinical montage are needed to investigate the temporal relationship of sleepwalking and night terror events to possible EEG abnormalities.

Advances in Biological Psychiatry

During the nineteenth century, scientific medicine was profoundly influenced by major advances in several fields: in microbiology, by Pasteur; in the formulation of the tissue theory of disease, by Bichat; and in the cell theory of pathology, by Virchow. The roots of biological psychiatry can be traced to the early nineteenth century, when Bayle introduced the illness concept for mental disorders with his thesis on general paralysis.1 In this work he showed that several mental patients had clinical symptomatology associated with pathological lesions in the central nervous system. The criteria used for the identification of patients with general paralysis were purely medical, that is, symptomatology that was causally related to organic lesions and that followed a predictable course.2