Narcolepsy: Sleep and Regular Sleep Routine Essay

Submitted By silvcele
Words: 792
Pages: 4
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What is Narcolepsy? This disorder is marked by periodic excessive daytime sleepiness, uncontrollable sleep attacks and cataplexy. Attacks usually last less than 5 minutes but sometimes occur at inopportune times. It might happen when studying, driving, fighting, playing a sport, etc. The person may collapse directly into a brief period of REM sleep, (a kind of sleep characterized rapid eye, accelerated respiration, heart rate, and increased brain activity) with its accompanying loss of muscular tension.

Treatments
Sleep Routines: Having a regular sleep routine can be helpful. Aim to get around eight hours of sleep at night if possible. You should try to go to sleep and get up at about the same time each day. Some people find that scheduled naps during the day can help to reduce their sleepiness.
Medicine: Narcolepsy might be effectively relieved by a drug that mimics the missing orexin and can sneak through the blood-brain barrier. In the meantime, physicians are prescribing modafinil to relieve narcolepsy’s sleepiness in humans. Sodium Oxybate can help to treat cataplexy if this is a problem. As well as helping with the symptoms such as excessive daytime sleepiness; disturbed night-time sleep; seeing, hearing or hallucinations; and with sleep paralysis. It may sometimes be used in combination with modafinil.
Other Treatments: You should try to avoid heavy meals and alcohol, as these can bring on sleepiness. Doing regular exercise may be of benefit and may help your symptoms. Talking to your peers about the disorder may help you not be depressed as well.

Who To Contact?
Miami Sleep Disorders Center
7029 SW 61st Ave
South Miami, FL 33143
(305) 666-2224
Alejandro D Chediak

[Web Address]

Narcolepsy

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A disorder marked by excessive daytime sleepiness, uncontrollable sleep attacks and cataplexy. A disorder more people should be informed about.

By: Silvana Cotrina and Valentina Narvaez

What Causes Narcolepsy To Happen?
During the night, healthy, people normally progress through several stages of sleep before entering or leaving the state of sleep called REM sleep. In narcolepsy, the brain-wave pattern can skip some or all of the other sleep stages, causing the person to move from the awake state immediately to REM sleep stage.
People with narcolepsy have been found to have reduced levels of a neurotransmitter chemical called hypocretin in their brain. Hypocretin helps to control your sleep-wake cycle. In someone with narcolepsy, lack of hypocretin is thought to play a part in the rapid switching between being awake and entering REM sleep. It has been suggested that narcolepsy may be a type of autoimmune disease where there is damage to the cells in the brain that produce hypocretin. (Normally, our body makes antibodies to fight infections; In autoimmune diseases, the body makes similar antibodies that attack its normal cells.) It has also been suggested that other things such as a virus may trigger the damage to hypocretin-producing cells in susceptible people.

Who Gets Narcolepsy?
It is clear now a day that Narcolepsy, is a brain disease.
Narcolepsy is most commonly diagnosed in your
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