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Letter

Nature Genetics 41, 708–711 (1 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/ng.372

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

Joachim Hallmayer , Juliette Faraco , Ling Lin , Stephanie Hesselson , Juliane Winkelmann , Minae Kawashima , Geert Mayer , Giuseppe Plazzi , Sona Nevsimalova , Patrice Bourgin , Sheng Seung-Chul Hong , Yutaka Honda , Makoto Honda , Birgit H|[ouml]|gl , William T Longstreth , Jacques Montplaisir , David Kemlink , Mali Einen , Justin Chen , Stacy L Musone , Matthew Akana , Taku Miyagawa , Jubao Duan , Alex Desautels , Christine Erhardt , Per Egil Hesla , Francesca Poli , Birgit Frauscher , Jong-Hyun Jeong , Sung-Pil Lee , Thanh G N Ton , Mark Kvale , Libor Kolesar , Marie Dobrovoln|[aacute]| , Gerald T Nepom , Dan Salomon , H-Erich Wichmann , Guy A Rouleau , Christian Gieger , Douglas F Levinson , Pablo V Gejman , Thomas Meitinger , Terry Young , Paul Peppard , Katsushi Tokunaga , Pui-Yan Kwok , Neil Risch & Emmanuel Mignot

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