Narcolepsy Research Paper

Narcolepsy is a chronic brain disorder that affects a person’s ability to stay awake during the day. Some symptoms include poor control of day-time sleepiness that consists of sudden spurts of extreme tiredness that may even be accompanied by uncontrollable sleep. The person may fall asleep for a few seconds to minutes while doing everyday activities. Hallucinations and partial to full paralysis are also possible symptoms that can occur before or after uncontrolled sleep spells. Interestingly enough people with narcolepsy spend around the same amount of time sleeping as any other person would. The sleep that they do get is just more spread out than that of a healthy person. A person with narcolepsy often has trouble sleeping at night and may
The early onset of narcolepsy in children can affect a child’s ability to develop in social and academic settings. There are four main symptoms of narcolepsy; these include excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), cataplexy, sleep paralysis, and hallucinations. The most common of these symptoms is EDS, people that experience EDS often report “mental cloudiness, lack of energy, a depressed mood, and/or extreme exhaustion” (Office) that accompanies the EDS. The involuntary episodes of sleep can sometimes be short lasting no more than a few seconds at a time but people report that after they awake from these sleeps that they feel refreshed and the feeling of drowsiness and fatigue usually subsides for an hour or two. EDS can be caused by an assortment of different medical conditions such as other sleep disorders, depression, anemia, and even consumption of caffeine, alcohol or nicotine. Sometimes automatic behavior can accompany EDS. During the periods of uncontrollable sleep the person may perform a normal everyday task such as writing or making a sandwich but after the episode have no memory of what happened. Narcolepsy is usually diagnosed because of the onset of EDS. Another common symptom of narcolepsy is cataplexy affecting about 70 percent of the people diagnosed. It is a sudden loss of muscle tone while the person is
In some rare cases narcolepsy can be caused by a genetic defect that inhibits the normal production of hypocretin. Genetics does not seem to be a factor in acquiring narcolepsy but if close family members do have the disorder then statistically the risk is higher a developing narcolepsy. Studies have shown that “when cataplexy is present, the cause is most often the discrete loss of brain cells that produce hypocretin. Although the reason for such cell loss remains unknown, it appears to be autoimmune in nature” (Office). Scientists have made progress in understanding narcolepsy in the past few years and have identified genes strongly associated with the disorder. They have found that a majority of patients with narcolepsy “have a specific HLA gene variant called DQB1*0602” (Office). Scientists “believed that certain HLA and TCR subtypes increase susceptibility to an immune attack on hypocretin neurons in the hypothalamus, leading to degeneration of these important cells”