Narcolepsy is a chronic condition, probably linked to a neurological problem, which triggers sudden episodes of daytime sleepiness (ie during the day)
These abnormal "sleep attacks" also occur at very active times of the day : it can happen, in fact, that the narcoleptic falls asleep in the middle of a meal, during work or during a conversation.
Also, those with narcolepsy
- He feels a persistent tiredness, which he cannot easily get rid of;
- It loses control of its muscles, especially after strong emotions ( cataplexy );
- He suffers from sleep paralysis and nocturnal sleep disorders . The latter, according to various studies, are due to an incorrect alternation between the REM phase and the NON-REM phase of sleep
- Report hallucinations
The precise causes of narcolepsy are still unclear.
According to some researchers, a peptide of the brain would play a leading role (NB: a peptide is a very small protein), called orexin or hypocretin .
Orexin is a neurotransmitter that regulates the ordered sequence of REM and NON-REM sleep phases .
In narcoleptic patients, it seems that the amount of hypocretin is lower than normal, which causes a disruption of the aforementioned phases of sleep.
The first researcher to coin the term narcolepsy was a French doctor named Jean-Baptiste Edouard Gélineau, in 1880 . Gélineau described the effects of the disease on a wine merchant who showed drowsiness and continuous "sleep attacks".
It should be noted, however, that the set of disorders, indicated later by the term narcolepsy, had already been delineated, between 1877 and 1878, by two German doctors named Westphal and Fisher .
Moving on to the twentieth century, precisely between the 1920s and the 1930s, researchers who described in detail the characteristics of narcolepsy and the anomalous behavior of narcoleptics were different ( Adie, Wilson and Daniels ).
It is in this same period that the term "sleep paralysis" was coined to identify the inability to move of a narcoleptic, at the time of awakening.
In 1957, the link between narcolepsy and the presence of: daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, sleep paralysis and hallucinations was definitively established.
Three years later, in 1960, Vogel - an expert in sleep disorders - identified for the first time, in narcoleptic subjects, the existence of an alteration between the REM and NON-REM phases.
Vogel's findings were confirmed by a certain Kleitman .
From 1960 onwards, sleep medicine made significant strides and sleep sickness centers became increasingly widespread.
The discovery of hypocretin dates back to 1998 and the hypotheses on its possible role are characterizing all the studies of recent years.
