The other line of research looked at chemicals. Seigel looked at his narcoleptic dogs, he found degenerating nerves in the amygdala and the medial septal nucleus. But in dogs, it first appears around one to two months of age. Now in humans, narcolepsy tends to appear in the teens and 20s. They are connected, via a number of steps, to the medial medulla, which, as you remember, helps control muscle tone. These parts are the amygdala, and the medial septal nucleus. He showed that damage to nerves in two parts of the forebrain happens in narcoleptic dogs. Jerome Seigel's research looked at nerves. Seigel from the University of California in Los Angeles found that when his narcoleptic dogs had a severe cataplexy (ie, sudden paralysis while remaining conscious), the nerves in the medial medulla fired at their maximum rate.Īt the moment, there seem to be at least two mechanisms to explain narcolepsy (although, if other diseases are anything to go by, there are probably another half-dozen remaining for the scientists to discover.) Magoun of Northwestern University discovered that when he fed low-voltage electricity to a part of the brain stem called the medial medulla, the muscle tone would vanish completely. Some research from back in the 1940s gives us a hint about the paralysis of REM sleep, and cataplexy. In your brain, the flow of blood, and the temperature, increase.īut while most people take 90 minutes to get to their first REM sleep, narcoleptics can get there in less than 10 minutes. And as a safety mechanism, to stop you from acting out your dreams, your muscles are paralysed. Your eyes flicker back and forth, as though you were watching a tennis match, hence the name, Rapid Eye Movement sleep. After 90 minutes, you are in a very light sleep, called REM sleep. Then you drift back up into lighter sleeps. Normally, when you drop off to sleep, you spend the first 45 minutes dropping down into deeper and deeper sleeps. REM sleep was discovered by Aserinsky and Kleitman in 1953. One very weird thing about the irresistible sleep that overwhelms the narcoleptics is that it is a REM sleep. The symptoms usually begin in a person's teens or 20s, get worse over a few years, and then stay the same until they die. And fourth, they can suffer from "sleep paralysis", where they are totally unable to move as they pass in, or out of, sleep. Third, they can have very real and vivid hallucinations as they transition in, or out of, sleep. Cataplexy can last from a few seconds to half an hour. Cataplexy can vary quite a bit, from a momentary sensation of slight weakness, to a sagging of the face muscles, right up to losing all muscle tone and dropping to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Second, they can suffer from cataplexy, which is a fancy medical word meaning a "loss of muscle tone while remaining fully conscious". They cannot stop themselves from falling into this sleep.
First, they have involuntary daytime sleeps and are always tired. There are four classical symptoms of narcolepsy, though not all sufferers have all four. So, in some cases, something in the environment must have set off the narcolepsy. But on the other hand, if one identical twin has narcolepsy, in 75% of cases, the other twin does not have it. And in some populations, practically all narcoleptics carry a genetic maker called HLA DR15. In some cases, there is a genetic or family link. Narcolepsy varies in frequency, from one in every 600 people in Japan, to one in every few thousand in the USA to just one in half a million in Israel. A lot of knowledge has been gleaned from narcoleptic Doberman pinschers and Labrador retrievers at Stanford University. He described narcolepsy as having "brief periods of irresistible sleep, and falls, brought on by emotional stimuli".Įven dogs can suffer from narcolepsy. Narcolepsy was first described way back in 1880 by Jean Baptiste Edouard Gineau. The name comes from the Greek, "narke" meaning "stupor" or "faint" or "blackout" and "lambanein" meaning "to seize". These people suffer from the disease called Narcolepsy. There are some people who are scared of any strong emotion (such as anger or passion), or any excitement (such as laughter).