And he looks at you with his eyes half closed and you have the feeling like he’s telling you “I love you,” but in fact he’s falling asleep. You see him fading, like “Oof, I fall asleep” and he kind of crumples, you know? Then he lifts his head again, like he nods, trying to stay awake. There are times when you see he really needs to take a nap. Yes he’s definitely sleepier than other dogs. I would have never thought I’d get a Chihuahua. So it was almost like a reincarnation of Bear! You probably know that I had another dog with narcolepsy before, Bear, and he just passed away. They didn’t really know what to do with the dog. In this case,, seeing that the dog was collapsing and falling asleep all the time, didn’t want to keep him. So he had returned the dog to the breeder, who took it to the vet. I received an email from a veterinarian in Vermont, telling me they had a dog with narcolepsy. Mignot told me he hopes that narcoleptic dog research – dormant for the last decade or so – might have its own revival to answer new questions about sleep disease. He believes dogs may experience this type as well.Īs Mignot, who was born in France, cooed French reassurances to his new companion, Watson sprang back into action, attacking the lamb chop that had been his undoing. (Becky Bach)īut Mignot and others believe another, “sporadic” form of narcolpesy may be caused by an immune reaction, perhaps to the flu. Watson has a form of narcolepsy that has one of two causes and becomes apparent when he's overly excited and then collapses. In 1999, Mignot identified the genetic cause of canine narcolepsy: a mutation that blocks a response to hypocretin, a brain chemical that keeps us awake. Mignot estimates that about one in a million dogs have the disease compared to one in 2,000 humans. The dogs – about 80 of them at the program’s peak – were mostly Dobermans and Labradors, collected over the years mostly via word-of-mouth. As director of Stanford’s Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, founded by the legendary sleep researcher William Dement, Mignot helped oversee the country’s first and largest pack of narcolepsy research dogs. on behalf of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine.If you’re a narcoleptic dog, Mignot is the owner you want. Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hypocretin hypothalamus stereotactic radiotherapy.Ĭopyright © 2017 The Authors. These findings suggest that disruptions in downstream signaling of hypocretin secondary to an intracranial mass effect might result in narcolepsy-cataplexy in dogs and that brain MRI should be strongly considered in sporadic cases of narcolepsy-cataplexy. Nine months after SRT, the dog developed clinical hyperadrenocorticism, which was successfully managed with trilostane. The Dachshund underwent stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT), which resulted in reduction in the mass and coincident resolution of the cataplectic attacks. The dog was also negative for the hypocretin receptor 2 gene mutation associated with narcolepsy in Dachshunds, ruling out familial narcolepsy. Cerebral spinal fluid hypocretin-1 levels were normal, indicating that tumor effect on the ventral lateral nucleus of the hypothalamus was not the cause of the dog's narcolepsy-cataplexy. A 6-year-old male neutered Dachshund had presented for acute onset of feeding-induced cataplexy and was found to have a pituitary macrotumor on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this report, a pituitary mass is described as a unique cause of narcolepsy-cataplexy in a dog. Familial narcolepsy secondary to breed-specific mutations in the hypocretin receptor 2 gene and sporadic narcolepsy associated with hypocretin ligand deficiencies occur in dogs.
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