Question: How will we know if we are suffering from narcolepsy?

Ee Lyn Lim answered on 26 Jun 2013:

That’s an interesting question! Now you’ve gotten me wondering that about myself 🙂 Narcolepsy has a set of quite specific symptoms, including falling asleep quite suddenly at random times during the day. But that doesn’t mean that you have narcolepsy if you feel sleepy in school!

In most cases, narcolepsy is actually an autoimmune disease, where your antibodies start attacking the part of your brain that regulates sleep. So going to a doctor to test for these antibodies (and to see if that part of your brain is being attacked) would be one sure way to tell if you have narcolepsy or not. That said, there are also cases of narcolepsy where that part of your brain is perfectly normal, and we don’t know what causes these cases yet. Talking to a doctor about how you feel during the day (people with narcolepsy might get poorer quality sleep, and feel exhausted all the time) will help figure out whether the condition should be classed as narcolepsy, or if there’s something else you’re doing (like staying up too late, or being too stressed out) that’s causing your sleep problems!