Excessive Sleepiness During the Day: There Could Be More to It than Lethargy

Before you brand someone who suffers from excessive daytime sleepiness all the time as innately lazy, perhaps you need to brush up your medical knowledge. For excessive sleepiness during the day could have several connotations. In fact, it could be a precursor to a host of sleep disorders including sleep apnea, hypersomnia or even narcolepsy sleep disorder. Unfortunately, there are a couple of factors that usually misdirect the sufferer as well as those around him or her. First of all, it is linked to exhaustion, lack of good sleep during the night,etc. Secondly, this symptom is common to many kinds of sleep disorders, resulting in misdiagnosis or even wrong treatments.

But doesn’t this create problems in diagnosis and subsequent treatments? It definitely does, but doctors do not stop at recording only one symptom. He or she would surely probe further to record the age and time of onset of symptoms, possible cause of onset, note the existence of parallel supportive symptoms and then apply the relevant methods of treatments. You too can understand some of the subtle differences amongst all these sleep disorders to know which of the many conditions you could be suffering from. For example, the primary cause of onset of sleep apnea is neglected snoring; whereas for narcolepsy sleep disorder, the cause is related to deficiency of levels of hypocretin in the brain, though excessive daytime sleepiness is a ruling symptom for both these disorders. Narcolepsy sleep disorder patients experience sudden and unannounced sleep attacks; but when a person is affected with hypersomnia, he or she would fall asleep gradually and not all of a sudden.

This makes it clear that excessive sleepiness during the day though appears to be a sign of laziness and unwillingness to take on responsibilities, etc, should not be taken lightly, as it could mean the onset of some kind of sleep disorder. If we consider hypersomnia, this symptom is one of the primary characteristic indicators. Chances are that you would hear the term ‘hypersomnolence’ often when doctors discuss excessive daytime sleepiness. But what is hypersomnolence? The medical term for excessive sleepiness is hypersomnolence and the illness is called hypersomnia. Termed as a ‘rare disease’ by the Office of Rare Diseases (ORD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hypersomnia currently affects less than 200,000 people in the US. It sets in early in life, when the patient is between 15 and 30 years of age. There is yet another kind of hypersomnolence called persistent daytime somnolence that one does not hear about very often, primarily because this disorder is hardly recognized, reported and treated. Ignorance at the level of clinicians and patients is responsible for lack of knowledge about the prevalence of persistent daytime somnolence, though it may result in morbidity and mortality. Snoring and disturbed sleep are two of the other symptoms of this disorder, which if neglected paves the way for diabetes, hypertension, etc.

If one was to get a clear picture of the condition that has set in, obviously, he or she has to look for other tell-tale symptoms. What are the other symptoms of hypersomnia that usually drive the patient to seek medical treatments? Over and above excessive daytime sleepiness, a typical hypersomnia patient would display proneness to have several half-hour daytime naps, which can strike at anytime, anywhere; he or she would sleep for inordinately long hours, at times more than 10 hours; speech problems, impaired reflexes, slow thinking, failing memory and low appetite.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of hypersomnia is that most of the time, patients do not respond well to treatments. Counseling for the family and friends, self-help, lifestyle alterations and drug therapy are the different facets of treatments provided to reduce the intensity and frequency of the symptoms. Some common recommendations for self-help include weight loss by doing physical exercises, relaxation exercises before bedtime, quitting alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, etc. Lifestyle alterations include maintaining better sleep hygiene, fixing sleeping hours, etc. Drug therapy would normally involve Modafinil, sodium oxybate, amphetamine, methamphetamine, dextroamphetamine, methylphenidate, and selegiline. Tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), clonidine, levodopa, bromocriptine, amantadine, and methysergide are also prescribed.

Learn more about excessive daytime sleepiness. Visit Marc MacDonald’s site where you can get important facts on Hypersomnolence and how you can properly handle this sleep condition. Cheers to healthy days!