Symptoms include excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy and sleep paralysis. Making certain lifestyle changes and joining support groups can help you better manage life with narcolepsy. A person with narcolepsy has excessive daytime sleepiness, with repeated episodes of sleep attacks, involuntarily falling asleep at inappropriate times, often several times a day.
When not available, the brain allows REM sleep symptoms to intrude on normal periods of wakefulness. In people with narcolepsy, this leads to both excessive daytime sleepiness and sleep problems at night. Most affected people have trouble sleeping longer than a few hours at night. They often experience vivid hallucinations while falling asleep or waking up.
If a person falls asleep in less than 8 minutes on average during the five naps, this indicates excessive daytime sleepiness. However, people with narcolepsy also have REM sleep that starts abnormally fast. If REM sleep occurs within 15 minutes at least twice out of five naps and sleep study the night before, it is likely an abnormality caused by narcolepsy. Occasionally, it may be helpful to measure the level of hypocretin in the fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
Symptoms of cataplexy may appear weeks or even years after the onset of ESD. Some people may only have one or two seizures in life, while others may experience many seizures per day. In about 10 percent of narcolepsy cases, cataplexy is the first symptom that appears and can be misdiagnosed as an epileptic condition. Seizures can be mild and only a brief feeling of minor weakness in a limited number of muscles, such as a slight drooping eyelids. The most severe attacks result in a total collapse of the body in which people are unable to move, speak or keep their eyes open.
The specialist uses the test to measure the degree of daytime sleepiness, and also how quickly REM sleep begins, as narcoleptics fall asleep quickly and experience early REM sleep. A positive MSLT is obtained when the patient fell asleep with an average sleep latency of less than 8 minutes in naps and had at least 2 naps reaching REM sleep.
And the combined drug oxybate can usually reduce excessive daytime sleepiness and cataplexy. These medications are taken while lying in bed and again during the night. These medications are the treatment of choice for people with narcolepsy and cataplexy. Buy Modafinil Online Side effects include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, urinary incontinence, drowsiness and sometimes sleepwalking. A multiple sleep latency test is performed to distinguish between physical fatigue and excessive daytime sleepiness and to detect narcolepsy.
Most cases of narcolepsy are believed to be due to a lack of a chemical in the brain called orexin, which promotes wakefulness and helps regulate sleep. Researchers currently believe that people are born with a genetic predisposition to develop narcolepsy; Eventually, often during childhood or adolescence, a triggering event can trigger the onset of narcolepsy. After that, the body’s immune system gets confused and mistakenly attacks brain cells that produce orexin, which then leads to symptoms of narcolepsy. For MSLT, a person has 4-5 opportunities to sleep every two hours during normal waking hours.