Causes Of Narcolepsy

People with Narcolepsy disorder always tend to have difficulty to stay awake. They can fall asleep very suddenly during the day. It’s like a sleep attacks to them. Even after they had enough sleep, they can still can easily fall asleep. This unusual sleeping problem is really affecting their social life, work and everyday life.

There are two kind of sleep that is non rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement. For normal people, they will go through the non-rapid eye movement sleep first before rapid eye movement period. But it’s different for people with narcolepsy. They usually will go through the rapid eye movement first before the non rapid eye movement.

Because of this, they normally will lose their muscle tone when they wake up. Worst, this muscle tone and loose of control can make them collapse. They also will be getting sleep paralysis that means they won’t be able to speak or even move no matter while they were waking up or falling to sleep. And when they wake up, they also tend to see hallucinations.

What are the causes of narcolepsy?

According to some research, it was stated that the main cause of narcolepsy is the brain which are lack of hypocretin chemical that works to stimulates the cells in the brain in order to give wakefulness. The reason for the lack of this hypocretin chemical in people with narcolepsy is still unknown. However, there are some factors that were known to be the causes of the lack of hypocretin, which is stress, and brain injury. If there’s a brain injury, there will be some loss of certain brain cells. Other factors are infection, and also changes of hormones. Nevertheless, it was also found that few numbers of people with narcolepsy has related to their relatives also with narcolepsy. Meaning, some people inherited the tendency of having narcolepsy disorder from their relatives.

Regarding the inheritance of narcolepsy, research has been made and it was been identified that gene also causes narcolepsy. Hypothalamus is a part of the brain that stimulates sleep behavior and the gene will gives way to the cells in hypothalamus to get messages from other cells in the brain. However, of the gene is not normal, those cells won’t be able to connect and communicate normally and this is why the abnormal of the sleeping patterns occur.

It does run in the family for some people, but most of them with narcolepsy, they don’t relate to any of their relative that suffers the same disorder. In conclusion, it doesn’t mean that if you don’t have any relatives with narcolepsy, you won’t get it.

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