Two Cases of Narcoleptic Patients with Sleep Paralysis as a Chief Complaint

Abstract

Sleep paralysis is considered as a dissociated state during which rapid eye movement sleep related muscle atonia appears while a subject is fully awake. We present a 22-year-old man and a 19-year-old man diagnosed with narcolepsy who previously visited our clinic with phenomenon of sleep paralysis. When a patient is brought to the clinic with sleep paralysis, various physiologic and medical conditions such as stress, trauma, hereditary factors, physical health, sleep disorders and other psychiatric disorders are taken into consideration. Prevalence of sleep paralysis in narcolepsy patients is known to be 20–50%. Therefore, it is necessary that clinicians should carefully examine the presence or absence of narcoleptic symptoms when dealing with patients with sleep paralysis and should conduct the multiple sleep latency tests confirm the diagnosis of narcolepsy if necessary.

Keywords

• Narcolepsy
• Sleep paralysis
• Polysomnography
• Multiple sleep latency tests