![]() Quality Measures for the Care of Patients With Narcolepsy. Krahn LE, Hershner S, Loeding LD, et al.National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. ![]() National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. RELATED: The Ultimate Guide to Healthy Sleep And because the boundaries between wakefulness and sleep become blurred, people with narcolepsy can experience extremely vivid dreams and hallucinations while falling asleep and waking up. Many people with narcolepsy enter REM sleep nearly immediately after falling asleep, rather than cycling through the stages of lighter and deeper NREM sleep first - or they experience the muscle weakness or dream activity associated with REM sleep during the day while they’re awake. Healthy individuals cycle through these stages of NREM and REM sleep multiple times throughout the night (each cycle takes about 90 minutes), with REM periods becoming increasingly longer.įor individuals with narcolepsy, these sleep cycles do not follow the typical pattern - and wake cycles can be disrupted, too.įor people with narcolepsy, sleep cycles can occur out of order and suddenly. Our bodies become paralyzed during REM sleep - presumed by sleep experts to be an evolutionary safety feature that prevents us from injuring ourselves or others by unconsciously acting out dreams. Here’s a primer on what’s going on when a person has this condition, as well as its potential causes. Night-time sleep is also disturbed frequent wake-ups are common. These episodes may last for a few seconds up to several minutes - or in rare cases as long as several hours. People who have narcolepsy may fall asleep suddenly and uncontrollably right in the middle of doing something like eating, talking, laughing, or even having sex, says Eric Olson, MD, a a professor of medicine and a sleep medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and a member of the board of directors of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). But the condition is most commonly diagnosed in late adolescence and young adulthood (anywhere from 15 to 35). Symptoms can appear in children as young as 2, says Emmanuel Mignot, MD, a professor of sleep medicine in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Center for Narcolepsy in Palo Alto, California.
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