Not even the Guinness World Records for voluntary sleep deprivation compares with what fatal familial insomnia sufferers experience. demonstrates what it’s like to be extremely sleep deprived. Victims of fatal familial insomnia go on for months with totally no sleep which ultimately ends with death.

Extreme sleep deprivation

Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) victims go through the state of extreme sleep deprivation once the disease triggers. Some of its effects may change from patient to patient, these are:

• Increased insomnia
• Muscle twitching or spasms
• Hallucinations
• Blurry vision
• Dizziness
• Paranoia
• Dementia

Fatal familial insomnia uncovered

Bizarre deaths in a particular Italian family lead to the discovery of this disease. Fatal familial insomnia has been discovered in the early 90′s. Dr. Ignazio Roiter, a specialist in internal medicine and endocrinology at the Treviso Hospital married into a family carrying this rare disease. His wife has been experiencing the loss of relatives approximately every 3 years. He then sought to uncover more information about his wife’s family and traced the bizarre deaths as far back as the 1700′s. What marked these relatives were periods of insomnia and symptoms due to months of no sleep.

Fatal familial insomnia explained

FFI is an extremely rare genetic prion disease of the brain which 40 families as of 2006 suffer from. Each family member has a 50/50 chance of inheriting this disease. This disease usually triggers when a gene carrier hits their 50′s. When it does, mutated proteins called prions start to accumulate around the victim’s thalamus. This is the part of the brain which regulates sleep among other functions.

Some experts contend that it is not insomnia that kills the patients. It is these proteins that continue to reproduce that eventually kills them.

FFI is a member of the prion family of diseases. Some of the other prion diseases are:

• Madcow disease
• Kuru
• Scrapie
• Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker
• Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)

Recent cases

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