ABSTRACT
The excessive daytime sleepiness of narcoleptic patients can be considered as an abnormal distribution of sleep and wakefulness over the twenty-four hours rather than a true hypersomnia. This suggests that the phenotypic features of the narcoleptic syndrome could be explained by a disregulation of the rhythmic sleep organization, resulting from an alteration of the interaction between homeostatic, circadian, circasemidian, and ultradian regulatory processes. This paper summarizes our experience on the sleep organization of narcoleptic patients in Bed Rest condition and aims at defining the dynamics of NonREM sleep, REM sleep and wakefulness in these patients, by means of a computing simulation of a mathematical model which takes into account the recent knowledge about orexin (hypocretin) deficiency.
