Abstract
In humans, narcolepsy is a debilitating and important sleep disorder that was first described in 1877 by Westphal, a German physician, based on his observation of a patient with sudden sleep attacks associated with symptoms of motor incapacity and aphasia. He considered it a form of epilepsy. Three years later, the French neurologist Gélineau (Fig. 24.1) described the disorder for the first time as a distinct clinical entity rather than a symptom of another condition, and proposed the term narcolepsy, meaning “sleep seizure”. In the 1880 paper, Gélineau described a patient who, from the age of 36, began to fall asleep suddenly during the day and had sudden falls or “astasia” (cataplexy), which occurred whenever he became emotional.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the contributions made by all who authored the studies described here and to those who advised us as this work proceeded. I particularly thank Rick Chemelli, Jon Willie, and Masashi Yanagisawa, who made these discoveries possible when they videotaped an orexin knockout mouse during the dark period and first observed what they thought might be a seizure.
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Sinton, C.M. (2016). Narcolepsy-Cataplexy in the Rats. In: Andersen, M., Tufik, S. (eds) Rodent Model as Tools in Ethical Biomedical Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11578-8_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11578-8_23
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