Narcolepsy Disease Details

Narcolepsy

Symptoms and Treatment of Narcolepsy

Narcolepsy is a chronic neurological disorder affecting the part of the brain that regulates when you sleep and when you’re awake. This can cause you to experience excessive daytime sleepiness and sudden loss of muscle control, often triggered by strong emotions. As a result, you may fall asleep while working, cooking, or even driving. Learn what you can do to reduce symptoms, improve alertness, and enjoy a full and active life.

  Signs and symptoms of narcolepsy

Most sufferers experience their first symptoms of narcolepsy between the ages of 10 and 25. However, those symptoms can vary greatly from one person to another. The main narcolepsy symptoms are excessive daytime sleepiness (with or without sudden sleep episodes) and abnormal REM sleep. Some other, unusual symptoms of narcolepsy may be related to your abnormal REM sleep, including hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and cataplexy (sudden loss of muscle control).
Two of the most common narcolepsy symptoms—excessive daytime sleepiness and cataplexy—are often connected to your emotional state. You may tend to exhibit these symptoms when you experience intense emotions, such as laughter, sadness, surprise, or frustration.
Common narcolepsy symptoms include:

• Cataplexy (loss of muscle control). Often, narcolepsy may cause you to have a sudden loss of muscle control while awake, usually triggered by strong emotions, such as laughing or crying.
• Hallucinations. Some people with narcolepsy experience vivid, sometimes frightening, visual or auditory sensations while falling asleep or upon awakening.
• Sleep paralysis. You may be unable to move or talk at the beginning or end of sleep.
• Microsleep is a very brief sleep episode during which you continue to function (talk, put things away, etc.), and then awaken with no memory of the activities.
• Nighttime wakefulness. If you suffer with narcolepsy, you may have periods of wakefulness at night, with hot flashes, elevated heart rate, and sometimes intense alertness.
• Rapid entry into REM sleep. Narcoleptics have unique sleep cycles. You may enter the REM or dream phase of sleep right after falling asleep, whereas most people take about 90 minutes to enter REM. Therefore, you’ll experience the characteristics of REM sleep (vivid dreams and muscle paralysis) at the beginning of sleep, even if that sleep is during the day.

The causes of narcolepsy

While researchers continue to seek out the root cause of narcolepsy, the general consensus is that your genetics, accompanied by an environmental trigger of some sort—a virus, for example—may affect your brain chemicals and cause narcolepsy.
Scientists have discovered that people with narcolepsy are lacking in hypocretin (also called orexin), a chemical in the brain that activates arousal and regulates sleep. Narcoleptics generally do not have as many Hcrt cells (neurons that secrete hypocretin), which inhibits your ability to fully control your alertness and accounts for your tendency to fall asleep. Scientists are working on developing treatments to supplement hypocretin levels to reduce narcolepsy symptoms.

Testing for symptoms of narcolepsy

Narcolepsy can often be either misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. People with narcolepsy often wait to consult a doctor because the most common (and sometimes the only) symptom is excessive daytime sleepiness, a symptom which could be indicative of many conditions. Additionally, narcolepsy symptoms are often falsely attributed to other sleep disorders or medical conditions (such as depression or epilepsy).
As the only unique symptom of narcolepsy is cataplexy (sudden loss of muscle control), diagnosis
of the condition can take a long time—often more than one year, sometimes as long as several decades. If you suspect you have narcolepsy, be sure to speak with your doctor about ALL of the symptoms you are experiencing.
Along with your list of symptoms, physicians and sleep specialists use the following methods to diagnose narcolepsy:

• Nocturnal polysomnogram – This overnight test measures the electrical activity of your brain and heart, and the movement of your muscles and eyes.
• Multiple sleep latency test (MSLT) – This test measures how long it takes for you to fall asleep during the day.
• Spinal fluid analysis – The lack of hypocretin in the cerebrospinal fluid may be a marker for narcolepsy. Examining spinal fluid is a new diagnostic test for narcolepsy.