What is narcolepsy, the disease that causes chronic sleep disorder?

Narcolepsy is a disease that affects only 0.05% of the population but which can be very disabling.

And for good reason, it brings together all the sleep disorders during the day, since the affected person can fall asleep at any time.

Doctor Jimmy Mohamed answers in Sans rendez-vous, on Europe 1, to all the questions that we ask ourselves about this very little known disease. 

"Narcolepsy is a sleep pathology that will associate daytime sleepiness with involuntary, irresistible sleep attacks. It is associated with cataplexy, a loss of tone in the head all of a sudden, triggered by often positive emotions.People are laughing, watching a children's cartoon and all of a sudden they fall into a form of cataplexy, but are still conscious, they don't pass out. It lasts a few seconds up to two minutes.

Other symptoms will be associated: hallucinations and sleep paralysis.

All of a sudden people fall asleep, they feel like they are paralyzed and cannot wake up.

There are therefore several sleep disorders, but which will manifest themselves often during the day.

Where does this disease come from?

The cause of this pathology is not well known.

We know that in the brain you have hormones, including orexin, which is used to regulate wakefulness and sleep.

It would be in deficit in people who have narcolepsy.

There would be a genetic part since we realized that we manage to highlight certain peculiarities.

There could be a triggering factor, in particular certain infections.

Narcolepsy happens more often in periods.

There are a little more in the summer, as if a seasonal viral infection could trigger the disease.

But at this stage, we have no real recognized causes.

Who is the victim of the disease? 

Rather, it affects adults.

But the mode of discovery is rather in children and adolescents.

So, it can exist and is underdiagnosed in children.

This disease remains relatively rare, 0.05% of the population is affected, even if you just have to be wary.

In children, it is necessary to watch out when they sleep more than usual with a non-restorative sleep and who will resume taking a nap.

If a child, after six years, goes back to sleep in the afternoon, this is not normal.

It doesn't have to be narcolepsy.

This could be either a sleep debt or another pathology that should be explored quickly.

Can we cure it? 

Those people who are also going to be overweight due to lack of orexin, prone to diabetes, and children are going to have precocious puberty.

We do not treat the disease permanently.

It is a chronic disease and it is almost incurable.

On the other hand, treatments can help improve the quality of life.

We will reduce daytime sleepiness, cataplexy and all the comorbidities that will associate diabetes, weight gain or certain anxiety disorders that we may have ".