Week 11 N676 Narcolepsy Presentation LATEST EDITION 2024

Week 11 N676 Narcolepsy Presentation LATEST EDITION 2024Narcolepsy Definition: Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that is often misunderstood. It is characterized by severe and persistent daytime sleepiness that can cause impairments in school, work, and social settings as well as heighten the risk of serious accidents and injuries (Suni, 2021). Screening parameters: Narcolepsy usually starts during the teen years or early adulthood and continues throughout life. Narcolepsy may cause: ● Sudden sleep attacks. These may occur at any time during any type of activity, such as eating dinner, driving the car, or carrying on a conversation. These sleep attacks can occur several times a day and may last from a few minutes to several hours. ● Sudden, brief periods of muscle weakness while a person is awake (cataplexy). The weakness may affect specific muscle groups or may affect the entire body. These periods of muscle weakness are often brought on by strong emotional reactions, such as laughing or crying. ● Excessive daytime sleepiness. ● Hallucinations just before a sleep attack. ● Brief loss of the ability to move when a person is falling asleep or just waking up (sleep paralysis). (Stanford health care, 2020). Clinical presentation: Beside excessive daytime sleepiness, patients may display the following symptoms: ● Cataplexy – a sudden weakening of the muscles, often triggered by a strong emotion. While cataplexy can manifest as something as minor as a slight slackening of the facial muscles, in extreme cases, a person may experience total collapse or even muscle paralysis. Cataplexy is a cardinal symptom as it almost always indicates that the cause of the narcolepsy is a lack of hypocretin in the brain. ● Sleep paralysis - the temporary inability to talk or move when waking; it may last a few seconds to minutes. ● Hypnagogic hallucinations – vivid, sometimes disturbing dreamlike experiences that occur while dozing, falling asleep and/or upon awakening. ● Automatic behavior – a person continues to function or talk while being half asleep, and awakens with no memory of doing these activities.