Narcolepsy is a usually sporadic disorder with a prevalence of 1:2,000—its importance is not just medical, for it has a major psychosocial impact. Narcolepsy, as described by Gélineau in 1880, presents with excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) and cataplexy.1 These features and typical findings on multiple sleep latency tests (mean sleep latency 5 to 8 minutes or 2 sleep onset REM periods in 70 t...

OBJECTIVE Narcolepsy is a severe sleep disorder that is characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexies and a tendency towards obesity. Recent discoveries indicate that the major pathophysiology is a loss of hypocretin (orexin) producing neurons due to immunologically mediated degeneration. Visfatin is a recently described proinflammatory adipokine. It is identical to the immune modu...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To evaluate eating behavior and energy balance as a cause of increased body mass index (BMI) in narcolepsy. DESIGN Case controlled pilot study. SETTINGS University hospital. PARTICIPANTS 13 patients with narcolepsy (7 "typical" patients, with HLA DQB1*0602 and clear cut cataplexy, with suspected hypocretin deficiency; and 6 "atypical" narcoleptics, i.e., HLA negative or wi...

Two simple visible spectrophotometric methods are developed and validated for the quantification of modafinil using 1,2-naphthoquinone-4-sulphonic acid (NQS method) and 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP method) as analytical reagents. The NQS method involves the reaction of modafinil with 1,2-naphthoquinone-4-sulphonate in alkaline medium at room conditions to form a yellow colored product exhibiting maxi...

Orexin deficiency results in the sleep disorder narcolepsy in many mammalian species, including mice, dogs, and humans, suggesting that the orexin system is particularly important for normal regulation of sleep/wakefulness states, and especially for maintenance of wakefulness. This review discusses animal models of narcolepsy; the contribution of each orexin receptor subtype to the narcoleptic ...