SALT LAKE CITY, June 19 — An extreme form of sleep-walking - having sex while asleep - is probably much more common than physicians have previously suspected, researchers reported here.
"The important message is that this is a real entity," said Colin Shapiro, M.B., ChB, Ph.D., of the University Health Network in Toronto at Sleep 2006, the joint meeting of the Sleep Research Society and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Doctors and others, including prosecutors, need to take this reality into account, he added. "It's a more common problem than people have hitherto recognized."
"I look at it as one form of parasomnia," he said in an interview. "People walk in their sleep, they talk in their sleep, they drive their motorbikes in their sleep, they eat in their sleep, and they have sex in their sleep."
