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More than strong coffee is needed to treat narcolepsy, often confused with other disorders.

Geneva / Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A team of doctors and scientists in the Lake Geneva region, working with researchers from France and The Netherlands, have for the first time been able to confirm the “presence of identified and autoreactive antibodies in human narcolepsy.” Nacrolepsy is  a sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness and attacks of muscle atonia, or limpness, triggered by strong emotions (cataplexy). The authors of an article published 15 February in the Journal of Clinicial Investigation note that while the medical world has suspected that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disorder, until now there has been no proof.

Research in Australia in 2004 and at Standford in the US in 2009 gave credence to the autoimmune theory.

The Lake Geneva region group and their European colleagues engineered a transgenic mouse model to identify peptides enriched within hypocretin-producing neurons. These served as potential autoimmune targets. Narcolepsy is caused by hypocretin (orexin) deficiency, with a parallel dramatic loss in hypothalamic hypocretin-producing neurons.

The research project involved teams from the HUG university hospitals in Geneva, the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne, the DNA Array Facility at the  University of Lausanne and the CHUV (university  hospitals) in Lausanne’s division of immunology and allergy, division of neurology, and Center for Investigation and Research in Sleep. The authors: Vesna Cvetkovic-Lopes, Laurence Bayer, Michel Mühlethaler and Mehdi Tafti.

Narcoplepsy is an under-diagnosed disorder, often confused with depression or epilepsy, with its symptoms often seen as insomnia. “It is as widespread as Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis and more prevalent than cystic fibrosis, but it is less well known,” according to the wikipedia page on narcolepsy.