Deadly Insomnia: Sporadic Fatal Insomnia

Insomnia is the inability to sleep. There are basically two types of insomnia. These types of insomnia are secondary insomnia and primary insomnia. Insomnia can be a distressing condition as it disrupts an individual’s sleep and leaves the sufferer feeling tired and lethargic the following morning.

However, there is an extremely dangerous and aggressive type of insomnia that not only robs the sufferer of their sleep, but eventually proves to be fatal. This type of insomnia is known as sporadic fatal insomnia.

To understand the topic of insomnia completely, it is important to fully explore all insomniac conditions. Therefore, understanding what sporadic fatal insomnia is and how this disease manifests itself in the human body is important knowledge to gain in understanding the condition of insomnia.

What Is Sporadic Fatal Insomnia?

Sporadic fatal insomnia is a type of insomnia that is not caused by stress, diet, changes in lifestyle, medications, etc. This type of insomnia is caused by a protein in the body called a prion. The prion somehow becomes malformed and affects one specific area of the brain. The area of the brain that is affected is the thalamus and the function of the thalamus is that portion of the brain that influences an individual’s sleep.

The similarity between sporadic fatal insomnia and mad cow disease are physiologically connected as both conditions are caused by the same deformed protein.

The Nightmare Of Sporadic Fatal Insomnia

The nightmare of sporadic fatal insomnia is demonstrated as the condition progresses in severity. Sporadic fatal insomnia is an extremely rare and aggressive disease that exhibits its early stages in individuals who are between the ages of 40 and 60 years of age. In addition, this disease seems to limit itself within specific families indicating a strong correlation that it is genetically transferred.

Those who have this disease begin with occasional problems involving the movement of their muscles as well as some negligible challenges in obtaining sleep. However, as the disease worsens the individual loses their ability to gain any sleep at all. This inability to sleep is real and the diagnosed individual is fortunate to obtain one hour of sleep each night.

Other symptoms include involuntary muscle movements, elevated pulse and dementia. In addition, the individual loses control of their tear ducts which results in the person shedding uncontrolled tears.

The next stage of the disease robs the individual of their short-term memory which ultimately results in the patient being unable to ascertain what thoughts are real and what thoughts are unreal. Finally, the individual with sporadic fatal insomnia becomes completely deluded. All diagnosed cases of sporadic fatal insomnia have resulted in the individual’s fatality within the time frame of one to three years.

Fortunately, there are very few diagnosed cases of sporadic fatal insomnia. In fact, there have been only 24 families that have been determined to be at risk for sporadic fatal insomnia.

However, there is speculation that some cases of dementia have been misdiagnosed which may suggest that there have been unreported cases of sporadic fatal insomnia. Additionally, at this time, there is no known cure for sporadic fatal insomnia.