Essay On Narcolepsy

Narcolepsy is a sleeping abnormality in which a person experiences sudden attacks of sleepiness during the day. Narcolepsy is an often-inherited neurological sleep disorder caused by the brains inability to regulate a stable sleep-wake cycle. (Turkington & Harris). People who suffer from this abnormality usually experience attacks of muscle weakness or paralysis and occasional dreamlike experiences while awake. Narcolepsy is a disturbance of the portion of sleep called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep into the waking period. During normal REM sleep, the muscles become deeply relaxed and the nerves to the muscles are basically paralyzed. The normal sleep period begins with about 90 minutes of non-REM sleep before REM sleep begins. But for a person

While he did not use the word "narcolepsy," he wrote about patients experiencing "a sleepy disposition who suddenly fall fast asleep” (White). After nearly two centuries, two German doctors named Westphal and Fisher studied patients who would randomly fall asleep. These patients also experienced other symptoms such as dream-like hallucinations while they were awake and "automatic behavior," which caused them to perform daily tasks while they were still asleep (White). The symptoms they studied long ago are the symptoms of narcolepsy that we now know today. Westphal was the first doctor who clinically described narcolepsy as a physical disorder due to loss of muscle control. The term “narcolepsy” was first discovered in 1880 by Jean Baptiste E. Gelineau, a neuropsychiatrist in France, who recognized a group of patients who had irresistible sleep triggered by strong emotions (Khran, 2001). To create the name of this sleep disorder, he combined the Greek words, narke (numbness, stupor) and lepsis (an attack, seizure). In 1902, the term “cataplexy”, was created by a physician named Loëwenfeld. Then finally in 1957, Mayo clinic doctors Robert Yoss and David Daly officially united the four classic narcolepsy symptoms (White). The four symptoms are what add up to make narcolepsy a unique sleeping