What are Night Terrors

Learn about night terrors, common amongst children. Monita Mendiratta, MD Pediatric Pulmonary DrMDK.com

Host: Sometimes kids have this condition as you will notice it before, night terrors. What is night terrors? Monita Mendiratta: Night terrors is actually a normal phenomenon in toddlers and can be normal up until the age of early adolescence. What it is is it occurs during slow-wave sleep, not during rapid eye movement sleep which is where we have nightmares rather night terrors that children wake up and have usually a rapid heartbeat, they may be screaming and may not be consolable until they truly awaken. They tend to awake from this deep slow-wave sleep and have no recollection of a dream, for say, because they were not actually dreaming and yet they were not in the rapid eye movement sleep. Host: Do they have any visual something negative that scares and then make them like this? Monita Mendiratta: It's believed so. Yes, it's believed that they have-- Host: The dream is almost like reality to them and they have the fear of what the reality really isn't. Monita Mendiratta: Yes and it's what we called a parasomnia that occurs during slow-wave sleep and it can be completely normal. What we have found is the incidents of night terrors may actually increase in children with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome and after treatment of it, we do see a decrease in night terrors. Host: If someone has sleep apnea, do they more have to get nightmares or any other kind of visual things because of not getting good sleep? Monita Mendiratta: Not necessarily. Actually, they may have a decrease in REM stage sleep because of their frequent arousal. Host: You use the term REM sleep. What is REM sleep? Monita Mendiratta: REM stage sleep is our deepest stage of sleep. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement which is what point the stage of sleep. We usually go from a wake stage to stage one, two, three, four and then REM stage sleep being the deepest stage of sleep in which all of our muscles relaxed. And that is actually the stage of sleep that we see the most events of obstructive sleep apnea because that is when our muscles are what we called atonic, our upper airway muscles are completely relaxed.