NarcolepsyA Sleeping Disorder
...alled hypocretin, which stimulates arousal and helps regulate sleep. This disorder also effects your central nervous system. Having sleep paralysis causes you to be unable to talk or move for a brief period when falling asleep or waking up. Experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations are vivid and often scary dreams and sounds reported when falling asleep. Treating this disease with medications is the first line of defense. Changes in behavior combine with drug treatment have helped most people with narcolepsy improve their alertness and help the enjoy an active lifestyle. Changes in behavior to encourage good sleeping patterns are avoiding caffeine, exercising regularly, using your bed only for sleeping, and getting eight hours or more sleep nightly. Symptoms of narcolepsy may appear as early as age ten, they must learn early on how to deal with the disorder while in school. They have to learn a good treatment plan to cope with the uncontrollable disease, in order to succeed in their school work. In young children of school age, the symptoms are often mistaken for mental retardation, learning disabilities or sleep deprivation. In older people symptoms have been frequently misinterpreted as psychiatric in nature. Early diagnosis and treatment helps prevent lost years of educational failure or poor career choices. In general, persons with narcolepsy should be encouraged to avoid careers where alertness is vital such as law enforcement, driving or flying. Narcolepsy can cause sexual problems, such as low sex drive and impotency. Both may result from sever sleepiness, depression, medications, or cataplectic attacks. These problems can result from a new medication or changed dosage that should be discussed with your doctor. Having narcolepsy when your pregnant can affect the fetus by having complications with the medication that was prescribed. Although the emotional, physical and psychological demands of having a child should be considered, many parents with narcolpesy do have healthy children and manage parenting successfully. Narcolepsy symptoms can also result in a change or loss of employment because of physical restrictions and social withdrawal. Loss of self-esteem, learning difficulties, and depression are also considered. A healthy physical routine, on going medical treatment, and sharing your concerns can help you cope and live with narcolepsy in a positive and safe way. Narcoleptics tend to have R.E.M. Sleep at abnormal times, especially at the very beginning of sleep. R.E.M. dreams may be experienced as hypnagogic hallucinations. They experience attacks in which they remain fully awake but cannot move. People with narcolepsy have a hard time staying awake, even though they get enough sleep at night. The cause is a problem with the sleep-wake mechanisms in the brain. The condition may be aggravated by conditions that cause insomnia, such as disruption of work schedules. Generalized weakness may occur for a few moments during the transition between sleep and sleep paralysis. They may have hallucinations in the transition between sleep and wakefulness. Visually, or auditory may precede sleep or occur during the sleep episode. They may even have a seizure from time to time which is very serious. Not all people who are abnormally sleepy have narcolepsy. Excessive daytime sleepiness can also arise from other medical or sleep disorders. People can run themselves down and get stressed out, which they feel is narcolepsy, when it really is lack of sleep patterns. Narcolepsy collapse only occurs immediately upon awakening or at the onset of drowsiness, and the temporary inability to use muscles. Examination and testing are used to rule out disorders that may cause similar symptoms, including lab tests, heart monitor, a breathing monitor, brain wave monitoring, recording amount of sleep and recording R.E.M. Sleep. Antidepressent medications such as impramine may be helpful in reducing episodes of cataplexy but usually does not reduce the number of sleeping episodes. Narcolepsy is usually controllable with treatment but cannot be fully cured. To this day, doctors have not found even one cure to narcolepsy. Since narcoleptics commonly report feeling sleepy when not active, a reorganization of their lifestyle so that they can be physically more active may be helpful. Occupations that require a continuous level of activity are usually able to be performed adequately by patients with narcolepsy, where as dull occupations are liable to be poorly performed. Mental stimulation to keep up the level of alertness and motivation is essential. Other somatic stress factors such as physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation may at times precipitate the onset of narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is a set of clinical symptoms including abnormal sleep features, overwhelming episodes of sleep, muscular weakness, and sleep paralysi...