For more than two decades, a 45-year-old woman's nights were crowded with problems that rarely show up together. She ate while asleep, had night terrors, acted out frightening dreams, repeatedly stopped breathing during sleep, lived on a delayed body clock, and fought heavy sleepiness during the day.
A case report in the journal Sleep Medicine documents the cluster: mixed sleep apnea, night terrors, sleep-related eating disorder, nightmare disorder with dream-enactment behavior, excessive daytime sleepiness, and delayed sleep-wake phase disorder. It also describes a notable turn. Her sleep-eating disorder resolved during a period that included substantial weight loss and treatment with a GLP-1 receptor agonist, the drug class that includes widely used diabetes and weight-loss medications.
