Narcolepsy is strongly associated with the T-cell receptor alpha locus

Abstract

Narcolepsy with cataplexy, characterized by sleepiness and rapid onset into REM sleep, affects 1 in 2,000 individuals(1,2). Narcolepsy was first shown to be tightly associated with HLA-DR2 (ref. 3) and later sublocalized to DQB1*0602 (ref. 4).

Following studies in dogs(5) and mice(6), a 95% loss of hypocretin-producing cells in postmortem hypothalami from narcoleptic individuals was reported(7,8).

Keywords

• Genome-wide association
• information
• evolution
• mutation
• region
• gene