A life consumed by sleep

Nothing he tried had worked. For Sigurjon Jakobsson, the trip to Atlanta with his family was a last-ditch effort to wake up. He had struggled with sleeping excessively for several years before coming from Iceland to see a visionary neurologist, who might have answers.

In high school, Sigurjon was a decathlete competing as part of Iceland’s national sports team. But at the age of 16, an increasing need for sleep began to encroach upon his life. Sigurjon needed several alarm clocks to get out of bed and was frequently late to school or his job at a construction company. He often slept more than 16 hours in a day.

Sigurjon feeling awake (Atlanta, summer 2018)

When Sigurjon describes his experiences, they sound like depression, although his mood and lack of motivation appear more a consequence of his insatiable desire to sleep. He quit sports. He dropped out of college and became isolated and lost touch with close friends.

“Your will to do things just kinda dies,” he says. “And then you’re always trying and trying again. It just gets worse. You kinda die inside from being tired all the time.”

At the recommendation of a neurologist in Iceland, Sigurjon’s family sought out David Rye, who is known internationally for his research on idiopathic hypersomnia, a poorly understood sleep disorder. Read more

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

The time Anna stayed up all night

Almost precisely a decade ago, a young Atlanta lawyer named Anna was returning to work, after being treated for an extraordinary sleep disorder. Her story has been told here at Emory and by national media outlets.

Fast forward a decade to Idiopathic Hypersomnia Awareness Week 2018 (September 3-9), organized by Hypersomnolence Australia. What this post deals with is essentially the correction of a date at the tail end of Anna’s story, but one with long-term implications for many people with difficult-to-treat sleep disorders.

In the summer of 2008, Anna Sumner (now Pieschel) was planning on getting back to her life and career. A few years before, she had been diagnosed with a condition with a frustrating name: idiopathic hypersomnia. It means “she sleeps a lot and we don’t know why.”

Neurologist David Rye and nurse practitioner Kathy Parker had treated Anna first with conventional stimulants, which were spectacularly unsatisfactory. See this 2013 Emory Medicine story for details. Parker and Rye eventually landed on something less conventional: flumazenil, an antidote for sedatives that was scarce and difficult to administer. After wrangling with the FDA and with flumazenil’s manufacturer, a longer-term solution came into view. At that time, Anna was unique: the only person taking flumazenil chronically for a sleep disorder.

Then she developed bronchitis. She lost her voice, which was a problem for someone whose professional role sometimes takes her to court. To treat her bronchitis, Anna’s internist had prescribed the antibiotic clarithromycin, known commercially as Biaxin. After taking it, she developed insomnia and couldn’t sleep for three days. She left frantic messages for neurologist Lynn Marie Trotti, who had become her main sleep specialist.

“This had never happened to me before,” she recalled recently. “I was concerned that it was some bizarre individual reaction to the medication.”

In our original Emory Medicine story, this event was described as taking place in 2010. That date was incorrect. Read more

Posted on September 5, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Measuring sleepiness: alternatives to five naps

In a 2015 episode of The Simpsons, Homer is diagnosed with narcolepsy. Overwhelming sleepiness at the nuclear power plant lands him in the hospital. Sampling his spinal fluid (ouch!), Homer’s chuckling, deep-voiced doctor quickly performs a test for hypocretin, a brain chemical important for staying awake and regulating REM sleep.

Reality check: testing for hypocretin takes time, and is not currently available in the United States. Let’s talk about how sleep disorders such as narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia are actually diagnosed: operationally, rather than biologically. The less flashy, but standard, way to assess patients is to ask them to take a series of five naps and see how fast they doze off, and how fast they go into REM sleep (the rapid eye movement dreaming phase).

This process, known as the Multiple Sleep Latency Test or MSLT, works pretty well for narcolepsy type 1, the more distinctive form of narcolepsy that includes cataplexy. And it’s hard to fake being sleepy enough to zonk out within a few minutes. But it has a bunch of problems, and dissatisfaction with the MSLT has been developing among sleep specialists for the last several years.

Lynn Marie Trotti, MD

At Emory, neurologists Lynn Marie Trotti and David Rye published an analysis of what I will call the “flip flop problem” in 2013, with others in the field following up more recently. The flip flop problem is: someone who takes the MSLT one day will frequently get another result if they take it again on a different day. Read more

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro 1 Comment

How much does idiopathic hypersomnia overlap with ME/CFS?

In everyday linguistic usage among non-specialists, sleepiness can blend together with tiredness and fatigue. Someone might feel “tired” after climbing a mountain or chopping down a tree, while “sleepiness” is different. Emory sleep scientists explore the pathological distinctions in a paper published in Journal of Sleep Research.

A team led by neurologists Lynn Marie Trotti and David Rye has been studying idiopathic hypersomnia (IH) for several years: people who experience excessive daytime sleepiness and “sleep drunkenness,” not explained by other medical conditions.

IH’s symptoms don’t usually include persistent muscle pain or a severe response to exertion. This separates the disorder from myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). But there is some overlap, which is what neurology resident Caroline Maness, Trotti and colleagues report in the new paper. The authors use the official term SEID (systemic exertion intolerance disease), which was recommended by an Institute of Medicine panel in 2015, but hasn’t really stuck among those in the ME/CFS field.

Some people with IH have disclosed that they were previously diagnosed with ME/CFS. Outside of the sleepy vs tired issue, some people with IH report symptoms shared with ME/CFS, such as impaired circulation in their extremities in response to cold, or dizziness upon standing. Speculatively, this may point to a possible problem with the autonomic nervous system. Trotti and a collaborator at Stanford, Mitchell Miglis, are now examining this issue further.

ME/CFS has had a history of controversy. Despite its devastating impacts, some have viewed it as psychological or somehow unreal, and sufferers have felt neglected or maligned by mainstream medicine. The National Institutes of Health has made efforts to turn that situation around by investing in ME/CFS research, and there has been a surge of attention recently covering ME/CFS (Amy Maxmen items in Nature, Stanford magazine feature, Unrest documentary).

Trotti, Maness and colleagues didn’t set out to dive into ME/CFS – they explicitly label this paper a pilot study, and the results say more about the “hypersomnolent” group of patients they have been seeing for the last several years, rather than the broader ME/CFS population. Read more

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

The journey of a marathon sleeper

A marathon sleeper who got away left some clues for Emory and University of Florida scientists to follow. What they found could provide benefits for patients with the genetic disease myotonic dystrophy (DM) and possibly the sleep disorder idiopathic hypersomnia (IH).

The classic symptom for DM is: someone has trouble releasing their grip on a doorknob. However, the disease does not only affect the muscles. Clinicians have recognized for years that DM can result in disabling daytime sleepiness and sometimes cognitive impairments. At the Myotonic Dystrophy Foundation meeting in September, a session was held gathering patient input on central nervous system (CNS) symptoms, so that future clinical trials could track those symptoms more rigorously.

Emory scientists are investigating this aspect of DM. Cell biology chair Gary Bassell was interested in the disease, because it’s a triplet repeat disorder, similar to fragile X syndrome, yet the CNS mechanisms and symptoms are very different. In DM, an expanded triplet or quadruplet repeat produces toxic RNA, which disrupts the process of RNA splicing, affecting multiple cell types and tissues.

Rye at San Francisco myotonic dystrophy meeting. Photo courtesy of Hypersomnia Foundation.

Neurologist and sleep specialist David Rye also has become involved. Recall Rye’s 2012 paper in Science Translational Medicine, which described a still-mysterious GABA-enhancing substance present in the spinal fluid of some super-sleepy patients. (GABA is a neurotransmitter important for regulating sleep.)

In seven of those patients, his team tested the “wake up” effects of flumazenil, conventionally used as an antidote to benzodiazepines. One of those patients was an Atlanta lawyer, whose recovery was later featured in the Wall Street Journal and on the Today Show. It turns out that another one of the seven, whose alertness increased in response to flumazenil, has DM.

In an overnight sleep exam, this man slept for 12 hours straight – the longest of the seven. But an IH diagnosis didn’t fit, because in the standard “take a nap five times” test, he didn’t doze off very quickly. He became frustrated with the stimulants he was given and sought treatment elsewhere, Rye says. Lab Land doesn’t have all the details of this patient’s history, but eventually he was diagnosed with DM, which clarified his situation. Read more

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Imaging sleep drunkenness: #IHAW2017

At some point, everyone has experienced a temporary groggy feeling after waking up called sleep inertia. Scientists know a lot about sleep inertia already, including how it impairs cognitive and motor abilities, and how it varies with the time of day and type of sleep that precedes it. They even have pictures of how the brain wakes up piece by piece.

People with idiopathic hypersomnia or IH display something that seems stronger, termed “sleep drunkenness,” which can last for hours. Czech neurologist Bedrich Roth, the first to identify IH as something separate from other sleep disorders, proposed sleep drunkenness as IH’s defining characteristic.

Note: Emory readers may recall the young Atlanta lawyer treated for IH by David Rye, Kathy Parker and colleagues several years ago. Our post today is part of IH Awareness Week® 2017.

Sleep drunkenness is what makes IH distinctive in comparison to narcolepsy, especially narcolepsy with cataplexy, whose sufferers tend to fall asleep quickly. Those with full body cataplexy can collapse on the floor in response to emotions such as surprise or amusement. In contrast, people with IH tend not to doze off so suddenly, but they do identify with the statement “Waking up is the hardest thing I do all day.”

At Emory, neurologist Lynn Marie Trotti and colleagues are in the middle of a brain imaging study looking at sleep drunkenness.

“We want to find out if sleep drunkenness in IH is the same as what happens to healthy people with sleep inertia and is more pronounced, or whether it’s something different,” Trotti says. Read more

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Gabbing about GABA — implications for hypersomnia treatments

Anesthesiologist Paul Garcia and his colleagues are presenting two posters at the Society of Neuroscience meeting this week, whose findings may raise concerns about two non-stimulant drugs Emory sleep specialists have studied for the treatment of hypersomnia: flumazenil and clarithromycin.

For both, the data is in vitro only, so caution is in order and more investigation may be needed.

With flumazenil, Garcia and colleagues found that when neurons are exposed to a low dose for 24 hours, the cells increase expression of some GABA receptor forms.

This could be part of a mechanism for tolerance. I heard some anecdotes describing how flumazenil’s wake-promoting effects wear off over time at the Hypersomnia Foundation conference in July, but it’s not clear how common the phenomenon is.

Flumazenil’s utility in hypersomnia became known after the pioneering experience of Anna Sumner, who has reported being able to use the medicine for years. See this 2013 story in Emory Medicine. Read more

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Momentum at hypersomnia conference

A visitor might not realize this was a meeting devoted to people who experience excessive daytime sleepiness. The 2015 Hypersomnia Foundation Conference on Saturday was full of energy, with:

*more than 245 attendees, about twice as many people as last year’s conference

*medical experts from France, Wisconsin and Louisiana — in addition to Emory

*data from several recent clinical trials

*some signs of industry interest in hypersomnia

Hypersomnia is a sleep disorder in which individuals feel frequent or constant sleepiness and need to sleep for long portions of the day (more than 70 hours per week). It is distinct from other sleep disorders such as narcolepsy and sleep apnea, but its prevalence is still unclear. Conventional stimulants such as amphetamine or modafinil often can be used to treat the sleepiness, but some with hypersomnia find these drugs ineffective or hard to tolerate.

Previous research at Emory has shown that many individuals with hypersomnia have a substance in their spinal fluid that acts like a sleeping pill, enhancing the action of the neurotransmitter GABA. The identity of this mysterious substance is unknown, but Emory researchers report that they are close to identifying it. That could give hypersomnia a “molecular handle” similar to what narcolepsy has, with loss of hypocretin-producing neurons.

The terminology is still up in the air — keynote speaker Isabelle Arnulf from Paris said, “The term ‘idiopathic hypersomnia’ does not mean that you are an idiot.” Rather, she said, it means that even specialists can have trouble distinguishing hypersomnia from other sleep disorders, and “idiopathic” signifies that the detailed cause is still under investigation.

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Hypersomnia update: clarithromycin study

From Emory Medicine, Spring 2013

A small clinical study of clarithromycin for the sleep disorder hypersomnia shows that the antibiotic can combat patients’ subjective experience of sleepiness, but it does not seem to improve reaction time measured in a video-game-type vigilance task.

The effects of clarithromycin in hypersomnia were first observed by Emory doctors when a pioneering patient (Anna Sumner, whose story is told in this Emory Medicine article) unexpectedly experienced sleeplessness when taking it for a respiratory infection.

The results of the study were published online by Annals of Neurology on June 10.

Lynn Marie Trotti, MD, David Rye, MD, PhD and colleagues from the Department of Neurology and Emory Sleep Center conducted the study, which involved 23 patients.

Advantages of clarithromycin:

It’s inexpensive and widely available.
It’s an option for people dealing with hypersomnia for whom other medications, such as modafinil, are not helpful or tolerable.
It represents an alternative to flumazenil, the benzodiazepine antidote that has been shown to help some hypersomnia patients. Flumazenil used to be very scarce, and shortages occur (Hypersomnia Foundation/American Society of Health System Pharmacists).

Disadvantages of clarithromycin:

It’s an antibiotic, so it probably changes intestinal bacteria.
Chronic use could promote the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Most patients reported an altered sense of taste or smell. Some describe this as a metallic mouth sensation.

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Hypersomnia update: beyond subject one

It’s not sleep apnea. It’s not narcolepsy. Hypersomnia is a different kind of sleep disorder. There’s even an “apples and oranges” T-shirt (see below) that makes that point.

This weekend, your correspondent attended a patient-organized Living with Hypersomnia conference. One of the main purposes of the conference was to update sufferers and supporters on the state of research at Emory and elsewhere, but there was also a lot of community building — hence the T-shirts.

The story of how sleep took over one young lawyer’s life, and how her life was then transformed by flumazenil, a scarce antidote to sleeping pills she was not taking, has received plenty of attention.

Now an increasing number of people are emerging who have a condition similar to Anna Sumner’s, and several questions need answers. Read more

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Neuro 7 Comments

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