Narcolepsy Disease

Narcolepsy is one of the most chronic diseases which affect certain part of the brain which functions to stimulate when to be awake and when to sleep. People with narcolepsy can fall asleep suddenly no matter what they are doing like even when they are working, having conversation, driving, and cooking.

Researched shows that 1 in every 2000 people has the potential of having narcolepsy. It is also known that narcolepsy can be inherited from family members with this genetic disorder. Many people notice their first symptoms in the ages between 10 to 25 years old. This is a long life condition. To deal with it, narcoleptics can implement changes in their lifestyle and look for medical treatment to improve their alertness and to live and enjoy a normal and happy life.

Many researches were conducted to find out the cause of narcolepsy. Scientist has discovered that narcolepsy patient’s brain is lack of hypocretin. Hypocretin is a chemical in our brain that stimulates us to sleep. People with narcolepsy usually don’t have many neurons and hypocretin cells to develop hypocratin. This drives them to find it hard to stay awake and control their alertness. Researchers are finding ways in order to develop treatments for the lacking of hypocratin problems. Inheritance occurs as one of the factors in narcolepsy other than environmental triggers that play a strong role as well.

The main symptoms of narcolepsy are narcoleptics sudden falls asleep and found themselves having excessive sleepiness during daytime. There are other narcoleptics symptoms which are hallucinations. Some narcolepsy experience vivid and frightening auditory sensation upon waking up. Besides, they also suffer loss of muscle control that normally triggered by strong emotions. Other than that they also had problems in their sleep paralysis, wakefulness during the night, microsleep and rapid entry into rapid eye movement sleep.

While considering the list of symptoms, sleep specialist and doctors uses some methods to diagnose narcolepsy disease. Those methods are nocturnal polysomnogram, multiple sleep latency test, spinal fluid analysis, and Epworth sleepiness scale.

All these symptoms give problems to people with narcolepsy. This is because they have to suffer from some of the effects in narcolepsy. Some of the effects are related to safety and physical well being. Narcolepsy can harm narcoleptics others. Many activities such as working, driving, walking and cooking is very dangerous to narcoleptics as they can suddenly fall asleep and lose their muscle control. For mental health, it is said that narcoleptics faces depression higher than normal people. For memory and attention, there are studies that report people with narcolepsy tend to have problems to stay focus and to remember things. This might be caused the brain abnormalities tiredness.

Even though there is no cure for narcolepsy yet, treatments and control of the symptoms can reduce it. There are several recommended treatments like counseling, changes in behavior, and medication. Antidepressants, stimulants and sodium oxybate are really helpful also. By combining those various treatments, it can help narcoleptics to control their symptoms.