The most common cataplexy is the knees buckling and that weakness that even your calves can get weak. I had 1 patient with narcolepsy who said she would be working on something stressful at work, and she just drops her pen. You can have shoulder weakness, arm weakness, hand weakness. The patient with pediatric narcolepsy will have a loosening of the jaw, and their tongue will protrude a little.Īfter you’ve seen it for a while, you recognize that it happens with their jaw and have neck weakness, like people bobbing with their head.
The jaw weakness is especially common in pediatric cases. I’ve had a couple of ophthalmologists send me narcolepsy patients, and I’m so excited about that. When I’m describing it to patients and I’m talking about the symptoms, I’ll start at the top of the head, with drooping eyelids or even blurred vision. There was another video of him sitting in the chair, and he would fall to the floor. He would get emotional, and he would fall to the floor. He was standing with his wife, and she would talk about something. When I was in medical school, and they taught us about narcolepsy-at that time you had to have all the symptoms to get the diagnosis-they showed a video of a man who had narcolepsy. Debra Stultz, MD: We have several other symptoms, but one of the other specific symptoms for narcolepsy is cataplexy.