title: Arousal disorders.
abstract: Arousal Disorders (AD) are motor behaviours arising from NREM sleep. They comprise a spectrum of manifestations of increasing complexity from confusional arousal to sleep terror to sleepwalking. AD usually appear in childhood with a low frequency of episodes and spontaneously disappear before adolescence. The advent of video-polysomnography disclosed the existence of other phenomena alongside AD, in particular nocturnal frontal lobe seizures, requiring a differential diagnosis from AD. History-taking is usually sufficient to establish a correct diagnosis of AD even though viewing the episodes is essential for the clinician to distinguish the different motor events. Videopolysomnographic recording in a sleep laboratory is not always necessary and homemade video-recordings are useful to capture events closest to real life episodes.
authors.affiliation: IRCCS, Istituto delle Scienze Neurologiche, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy. federica.provini@unibo.it
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Provini
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Tinuper
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Bisulli
authors.forename: Elio
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lugaresi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D020184:Night Terrors / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology; D017286:Polysomnography; D020921:Sleep Arousal Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000628:therapy; D013009:Somnambulism / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology