A few of the more notable symptoms of this disorder include large amounts of weight gain over short periods of time, particularly in women; irritability during the day, due to lack of restful sleep; and vivid dreams at night. It is easily distinguished from regular sleepwalking by the typical behavioral sequence consisting of "rapid, automatic arising from bed, and immediate entry into the kitchen." In addition, throughout all of the studies done, doctors and psychiatrists discovered that these symptoms are invariant across weekdays, weekends, and vacations as well as the eating excursions being erratically spread throughout a sleep cycle. Most people with this disease retain no control over when they arise and consume food in their sleep. Although some have been able to restrain themselves from indulging in their unconscious appetites, some have not and must turn to alternative methods of stopping this disorder. It is important for trained physicians to recognize these symptoms in their patients as quickly as possible, so those with NSRED may be treated before they injure themselves. Diagnosis
Criteria
The diagnostic criteria utilized by the International Classification of Sleep Disorders-Third Edition (ICSD-3) include some dysfunctional eating when the person wake up during the main sleep period, eating unusual or toxic food, negative health consequences. The patient could be injured during these episodes and he might not be conscious and wont remember them. This criterion differentiates SRED from Night eating syndrome(NES). Patients with NES are conscious during the episode.
Schenck and Mahowald also discovered that none of the patients had any eating instability before their problems at night while sleeping. In their 1993 report, they summarized the major findings with the idea that women encompass at least two thirds of the patients and that the majority of these patients had become overweight. They also discovered that while the patients night-eating normally started during early adulthood, this wasnt always the case as it started as early as childhood to as late as middle adulthood. These patients not only had NSRED, but many of them had also had other nighttime behaviors such as sleep terrors for several years. This revolutionized the way people saw NSRED. With the technological age growing and more people becoming obese, Schenck and Mahowalds discovery of NSRED causing a large weight increase helped doctors more easily identify this disorder. As seen in Table 1 below, almost half of Schenck and Mahowalds patients were significantly obese. According to body mass indexs criteria, no patient was emaciated. Schenck and Mahowald said, "virtually all patients had accurate non-distorted appraisals of their body size, shape, and weight. Furthermore, unlike the patients in Stunkards series, none of our patients had problematic eating in the evening between dinner and bedtime; sleep onset insomnia was not present; and sleep latency was usually brief, apart from several patients with RLS." After realizing what was wrong with them, many of Schenck and Mahowalds patients with NSRED restricted their day eating and over exercised.