NatureNews- Narcolepsy confirmed as autoimmune disease

Narcolepsy confirmed as autoimmune disease Results also partly explain why the 2009 swine flu virus, and a vaccine against it, led to spikes in the sleep disorder.
18 December 2013
As the H1N1 swine flu pandemic swept the world in 2009, China saw a spike in cases of narcolepsy — a mysterious disorder that involves sudden, uncontrollable sleepiness. Meanwhile, in Europe, around 1 in
15,000 children who were given Pandemrix — a now-defunct flu vaccine that contained fragments of the pandemic virus — also developed narcolepsy, a chronic disease.
Immunologist Elizabeth Mellins and narcolepsy researcher Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University School of Medicine in California and their collaborators have now partly solved the mystery behind these events, while also confirming a longstanding hypothesis that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system attacks healthy cells.
Narcolepsy is mostly caused by the gradual loss of neurons that produce hypocretin, a hormone that keeps us awake. Many scientists had suspected that the immune system was responsible, but the Stanford
team has found the first direct evidence: a special group of CD4 + T cells (a type of immune cell) that targets hypocretin and is found only in people with narcolepsy.
“Up till now, the idea that narcolepsy was an autoimmune disorder was a very compelling hypothesis, but this is the first direct evidence of autoimmunity,” says Mellins. “I think these cells are a smoking gun.” The study is published today in Science Translational Medicine

1.Thomas Scammell, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, says that the results are welcome after “years of modest disappointment”, marked by many failures to find antibodies made by a person’s body against their own hypocretin. “It’s one of the biggest things to happen in the narcolepsy field for some time.”
Loose ends
It is not clear why some people make these T cells and others do not, but genetics may play a
part. In earlier work

2, Mignot showed that 98% of people with narcolepsy have a variant of the gene HLA that is found in only 25% of the general population