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Narcolepsy
Last edited |
10/22/2008
This syndrome is
characterized by an imperative need to sleep suddenly and for brief periods,
recurring at more or less close intervals
Narcolepsy was first labeled by Gelineau in 1880.
Yoss and Daly, in 1957, completed the
description of the disease and described the narcolepsy tetrad, which consists
of:
This description still prevails today in sleep
disorders classification (International Classification of Sleep Disorders and
DSM-IV).
Until our study, most prevalences were derived from:
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clinical samples (Roth, 1980; Franceschi et al.,
1982; Wilner et al., 1988; Wing et al., 1994)
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or non-representative community
samples (Solomon, 1945; Dement et al., 1972. 1973; Honda et al., 1983):
According to these
first studies, the prevalence varied from 20 to 67 per 100,000
inhabitants in Europe and North America (Franceschi et al., 1982; Dement et al.,
1972. 1973; Hublin et al., 1994).
A study performed in Japan set this rate at
590 per 100,000 inhabitants (Tashiro et al., 1992).
Another Japanese study
set this rate at 160 per 100,000 inhabitants (Honda, 1979).
In Hong Kong, this
prevalence was estimated to be between 1 and 40 narcoleptics per 100,000
inhabitants (Wing et al., 1994), and in Saudi Arabia 40 per 100,000 inhabitants
(al Rajeh et al., 1993).
Another study performed with Jews in Israel, a
population known for its low rate of human leukocyte antigen (HLA-DR2), a
predisposing marker for narcolepsy, set the prevalence at 0.23 per 100,000
inhabitants (Wilner et al., 1988).
None of these previous studies assessed the
prevalence of the diagnostic elements of the narcolepsy diagnosis in a large
representative sample of the general population.
Research
To determine the prevalence of narcolepsy in the general
population of five European countries.
Target
population: 205,890,882 inhabitants.
Overall,
18,980 randomly selected subjects were interviewed
(participation rate: 80.4%).
These subjects were representative of the general
population of :
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the
United Kingdom,
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Germany,
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Italy,
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Portugal
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and
Spain.
They were
interviewed by telephone using the Sleep-EVAL expert system, which provided
narcolepsy diagnosis according to the International Sleep Disorders
classification (ICSD) and the Psychiatric Disorders Classification (DSM-IV).
Results
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Excessive daytime sleepiness was reported by 15% of the sample, with a higher
prevalence in the United Kingdom and Germany.
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Cataplexy (episodes of loss of muscle function related to a
strong emotion), a cardinal symptom of narcolepsy, was found in 1.6% of the
sample.
A narcolepsy diagnosis was found in
0.047% of the sample.
The
narcolepsy was severe for 0.026% of the sample and moderate in 0.021% of the
sample.
This was the first epidemiological study that estimated the
prevalence of narcolepsy in the general population of five European
countries.
Narcolepsy affects 47 individuals per 100,000 inhabitants.
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Sleep-EVAL
Research
