ABSTRACT
Narcolepsy is a common sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness with sleep attacks, cataplexy, hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and automatic behaviors. The major part of the literature on narcolepsy is focused on its etiology, pathophysiology, and treatment. Since narcolepsy has also a very significant deleterious impact on many areas of daily life the psychosocial aspects of this illness have been thoroughly studied in many studies (1-3). Comparison of the life effects of narcolepsy-cataplexy to those of matched patients with epilepsy lacking evidence for CNS lesions found the impact of narcolepsy to be as great or greater in all life areas other than education (4). Bruck compared the psychosocial impact of narcolepsy to that of three other chronic medical conditions-cardiac disease, a mixed group of cancers, and diabetes and found that the impact of was greatest for narcolepsy (5). It is also important to compare parameters to matched data from the general population. Nevsimalova and colleagues in a Czech study (6), reported that, although 81% of patients with narcolepsy were overweight, their average BMI was not different from matched population statistics; moreover, although many of their narcolepsy patients blamed educational problems on the disease, they in fact had achieved a higher average education level than the national average.
