Sleeping is a fundamental action for everyone’s health, which allows us to recover strength and mental clarity every day. In fact, there is very little going on without sleep before starting to show severe symptoms.
Yet, for various reasons sometimes not everything goes as it should, and you can suffer from sleep disturbances. In some cases, you may suffer from insomnia, where you cannot get enough sleep or your sleep quality is not good. In other cases, you may suffer from the opposite problem, namely hypersomnia.
And it is important to be able to recognize and manage these disorders in order to live peacefully and without serious consequences. So, let’s see how to best deal with one of these disorders, narcolepsy.
Here’s how to best recognize and deal with this fearful sleeping sickness
Narcolepsy is a sleeping sickness that causes sudden sleepiness at unpredictable times. This disease is caused by the absence of a substance that acts as a chemical messenger in our brain, hypocretin. Hypocretin is a molecule that participates in the regulation of the sleep-wake rhythm and which sometimes, in pathological conditions, can be missing because the immune system attacks some specific neurons. In fact, in these cases we witness the disappearance of the neurons that produce hypocretin and therefore also the disappearance of the molecule.
As a result, people who do not produce hypocretin do not regulate their sleep-wake rhythms well, and they risk falling asleep at any time.
Symptoms of narcolepsy are:
- excessive daytime sleepiness;
- cataplessia;
- hallucinations when you fall asleep or wake up;
- sleep paralysis.
Of these symptoms, only excessive daytime sleepiness always occurs, while the others change from person to person.
What to do when suspected of suffering from narcolepsy
As we have seen, narcolepsy is a sleep disorder and here’s how to best recognize and deal with this fearful sleeping sickness. When you suspect that you are suffering from narcolepsy, it is advisable to contact the attending physician, who will prescribe the necessary tests for the diagnosis.
Then, once it is confirmed that it is narcolepsy, it must be accepted that there is no cure. Nonetheless, there are treatments that allow sufferers to live a normal life. In general, it is recommended that you get plenty of regular sleep at night, and take a nap at the same time every afternoon. And this may be enough to calm the symptoms, but if that weren’t enough, there are several drugs that help decrease sleepiness. So, step by step, the doctor will decide the right treatment for each patient.
Here, then, is what narcolepsy is and how to recognize it, and how to manage it.