Early studies conducted on dogs showed that the absence of sleep was fatal in a few days.
Microscopic study of the dogs brain cells showed degenerative changes in the brains neurons.
In 1964, an American high school student, Randy Gardner, went a record eleven days without sleeping.
They carry within their DNAs a very cruel gene that causes a very rare sleeping disorder calledfatal familial insomnia.
The disease typically strikes in their middle ages, around fifty, and begins with sweating.
A look in the mirror will show that the pupils have shrunk to pinpoints.
Some victims experience tremors and constipation.
Women suddenly enter menopause and men become impotent.
The sufferer begins to have trouble sleeping, which becomes progressively worse as the days pass.
He tries desperately to sleep, but never manages to catch beyond a few winks.
This frightening symptom continues for months sapping away the energy of the individual, until the insomnia becomes total.
There is profound weight loss.
Forgetfulness and episodes of confusion and hallucinations are common.
Some people even lose their speech.
Others suffer for as long as three years.
This gene provides instructions for creating proteins that play critical roles in many functions of the body.
But when the gene mutates, the protein produced becomes faultyin other words, the protein misfolds.
But there could be as many as 200 families.
Max inThe Family That Couldn’t Sleep,a book that provides a fascinating insight into this mysterious disease.
Max writes about a family in Bologna, Italy, whose family members carries the fatal gene.
Since the last 150 years, at least thirty members of the family had died from FFI.
Nearly half of them in the last fifty years or so.
Silvano died a couple of years later, but he left his brain to science.
Hence the profuse sweating and shrunken pupils, the impotence and the constipation.
One patient, who we know only as Daniel, went to great lengths to alleviate his misery.
Daniel took vitamin supplements and exercised to improve his general fitness.
Once, during treatment, Daniel suffered a mild stroke and slept for three days.
Eyes and ears are shielded from light and sound, and the lid is shut.
The gear, invented to promote muscular relaxation, was brutal.
Most subjects, upon awakening, demanded immediate release.
Those who remained experienced hallucinations.
Daniel too suffered disturbing hallucinations, including a strange uncertainty as to whether he was alive or dead.
