Essay On Narcolepsy

What is narcolepsy and how does it affect life as a person with narcolepsy. You may or may not know what narcolepsy or you just may know a little bit about it. Narcolepsy is a chronic brain disorder that affects a person’s sleep cycle. In most cases narcolepsy can be very dangerous driving becomes hazardous and some to most people with narcolepsy have to wear a helmet depending on how severe their case of this disease is. Narcolepsy has about 20,000 to 200,000 cases a year. People with narcolepsy have “sleep attacks” these attacks can last a few seconds to a few minutes. People can have these “sleep attacks” while at school, at work, talking to your friend, eating food, playing games, and the worst is driving. The symptoms of narcolepsy are; cataplexy (loss of muscle control), hallucinations, sleep paralysis, micro sleep is a very brief sleep episode during which you continue to function (talk, put things away, etc.), and then awaken with no memory of the activities, nighttime wakefulness, rapid entry into REM sleep. For most people sleep is about 8 hours. Peoples with narcolepsy experience either

Sometimes 10 percent of narcolepsy and cataplexy experience a close family member that is having the same symptoms. To get diagnosed with narcolepsy some doctors have you keep a journal of your time of sleep, symptoms generally under 3 weeks. If you experience cataplexy then chances are you might have narcolepsy as cataplexy is the most common symptom. To diagnose narcolepsy generally doctors will perform two test one of them is called polysomnogram, and the other is called multiple sleep latency test. You usually get tested with these two tests during the day. Generally these tests are taken during the day to record someone’s tendency to fall asleep. If the person being tested falls into “REM” sleep then the higher chance that you will be diagnosed with this