Causes of Narcolepsy

Until very recently, researchers studying narcolepsy have found it to be a mysterious disorder whose causes have been hard to pin down. But today much more is known about this seemingly inexplicable sleep-disorder, even though it may still have multiple causes. Two pioneering teams of scientists, using animal research models, have discovered what they believe are the physiological roots of this disorder. The discoveries that were made by these researchers have immensely helped doctors and patients deal with this sleep disorder, and have fuelled a new surge of research activity in the field. Today, several teams of narcolepsy researchers are working at sleep centers, universities and hospitals around the world trying to understand the causes of narcolepsy more thoroughly. The aims of their work include finding ways to diagnose and treat this debilitating disorder more efficiently, and making life easier for those who suffer from it.

The first of the research teams that made this breakthrough was from the Stanford University School of Medicine in California and was led by Dr. Emmanuel Mignot (in the picture – on the right), who is arguably the most well known personality in the field. The second team was from the University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center, and was led by Dr. Masashi Yanagisawa (on the left), now an eminent researcher in the field of sleep related ailments, especially narcolepsy, as well. Mignot, originally from France, continued the work of William Dement at Stanford, who in 1973 had begun to breed narcoleptic dogs – Doberman pinschers and Labrador retrievers – that displayed symptoms very similar to human narcolepsy. After 10 years of research with these animals, Mignot finally pinpointed the genetic mutation that caused their narcolepsy in 1999. At the same time Yanagisawa, using the mouse model, was working on a project unrelated to narcolepsy (he wanted to identify the neurotransmitters, or chemical messengers, that acted on certain receptors in the brain) in Texas when he unknowingly stumbled upon a specific genetic link to this disorder whilst studying neuropeptides that supposedly affected appetite changes in mice.

In what Mignot described as an ‘amazing convergence’, these two discoveries came together perfectly and served to explain what was previously thought to be an incapacitating yet unfathomable disorder. Yanagisawa and Mignot’s work has led to the generation and modification of some plausible hypotheses about human narcolepsy, including the autoimmune hypothesis, the genetic hypothesis and the hypocretin/orexin model. To learn more about the basic physiology of the disorder, their research and these relatively new causal theories of narcolepsy please browse to the following sections:

What Causes Narcolepsy?