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Narcolepsy and Cataplexy

Monica Gow and Dr. Kenneth Sassower discuss narcolepsy and cataplexy on Health Headlines Fox 25.

Monica Gow is the founder of Wake Up Narcolepsy; her teenage son suffers from the disorder. We learn from Monica that narcolepsy is a neurologic sleep, wake medical disorder, a lifeline disorder. Cataplexy is a symptom of narcolepsy, and with cataplexy people who experience emotion might lose muscle tone in their legs and collapse. Also, their arms might lose muscle tone and often neck will slack and give out. Monica's son is diagnosed with both of these conditions, at age 15. With the narcolepsy he was sleeping all the time, up to 18 hours. He was diagnosed thankfully, only after 3 months of the symptoms. He was falling all the time and the doctors recommended we take video of him because we couldn't figure out what was going on, so we videoed him experiencing the cataplexy.

Essentially what is happening is that folks are having REM sleep or dream sleep which is intruding them during their day time behaviors. So in other words someone can be awake and see things or even hear things and be in a function of dream sleep.

How did you start noticing this was happening because he was not purposely falling asleep because he wanted to take a nap, I mean he really couldn't control these issues. The on set age for typical narcolepsy is between 10 and 15, which most people think it as an adult medical disorder. He was sleeping a little bit at a time, riding in a car, fell asleep on the floor, the teacher called me from school and said he was asleep. With all the sleeping and falling down, we just started and 20 doctor visits later with different doctors we figured out what it was and also he had two misdiagnosis in the middle of the 3 months as well. So you knew something was wrong but it was just getting to the bottom of what it was.

To the affect of caring for it, treating it, you started Wake Up Narcolepsy, you wanted people to know about this so what exactly are you doing with that and how can people get involved.

After going through with what he had to in order get diagnosed and learning how people wait 810 years usually to get diagnosed, we decided we needed to raise awareness so we have awareness programs, events and fundraising programs as well.

Did you want to start Wake Up Narcolepsy to help other people?

Correct. For children, getting them diagnosed is the big step, getting them treated with proper medication is the second big step and nowadays in the past 10 years there's medicine that allows him to go to school and get decent grades and this is new in medication that wasn't available in the past.

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