Those who suffer from narcolepsy can wisely blame their immune system. Recently, researchers have associated the disabling sleep disorder with two immune system genes. They suggest that it is an autoimmune disease. This is a significant breakthrough for treatment related to narcolepsy.
In general, only one out of 2000 people will suffer from narcolepsy. It is thus as frequent as multiple sclerosis. The disorder carries some rare categories of symptoms. It includes extensive drowsiness during daytime, cataplexy, abrupt loss of muscle tone, unregulated sleep attack and emotional disequilibrium such as an excellent laugh. The various victims of narcolepsy have to consume medication such as sleep-suppressing drugs, and unfortunately, there is no cure available for the disorder.
A sleep researcher from Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, Emmanuel Mignot has shed light on narcolepsy. He has studied the disorder for over 20 years. In the end of the 1990s, his team did successfully find that narcoleptics lack hypocetin, a particular hormone present in some brain cells, which are essential for keeping animals and people awake. However, for narcoleptic patients, the process that produces the hormones is good, yet the cells themselves are absent, meaning that there is something that is destroying them.
It is also suggested that narcoleptics have particular variants of the so human leukocyte antigen (HLA). The HLT is responsible to active the body’s immune system against pathogens, thereby the immune cells will try to de-active pathogens. Common autoimmune diseases are associated with particular HLAs, such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Yet, later studies haven’t established any immune link, this made Mignot as well as other sleep researchers believed that an autoimmune attack was damaging the hypocretin-producing cells in narcoleptic patients.
Mignot decided to test the hypothesis. He joined Joachim Hallmayer, a geneticist from Stanford as well as a network of colleagues from around the world. The study involved examining DNA of roughly 4000 participants. All these patients had an alike narcolepsy-linked HLA. However, only 50 percent of them actually had narcolepsy.
The study found that narcoleptics had a common version of a gene that communicated to T cells (immune cells responsible for the destruction of intruders such as a virus, “example for skin cells”) on how to respond to various pathogens that come with HLA molecules. It was found that HLA and T cells came together to negatively regulate the body’s immune reaction by ravaging narcoleptic’s hypocretin cells. This was published in an online report in Nature Genetics.
According to Mignot, the research does not explain why T cells start to attach hypocretin cells. The triggers for most autoimmune diseases are still a mystery. Mignot says that scientists do not really know how the process occurs “…why bodies go haywire and start attacking themselves”. However, he believes that studies in the future will reveal the underlining cause. In the meantime, this research will help to improve treatments for narcolepsy.
Micheal Silber who is a neuroscientist at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minsota says that it has been known for long a time that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease “…but every attempt to prove it has turned up nothing”. Yet, this study does conclusively confirm that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease. It is thus a major progress in the field of autoimmune disease.
Source: Science Mag
Sat, Jul 3, 2010
Health And Aging