The Disease That Kills Your Sleep and Then You
There are many diseases that can mess with your sleep, but the scariest and most bizarre one of all might be fatal familial insomnia.
Those afflicted with FFI will experience mild insomnia at first. Soon enough, however, the loss of sleep grows steadily worse, to the point where sleeping isn’t possible at all anymore. Other neurological symptoms such as speech problems, hallucinations, and eventually full-blown dementia appear as well. Like the name suggests, there is no cure for FFI and people usually die within weeks to months of the illness first making its presence known.
The silver lining here is that the disease is incredibly rare. It’s caused by prions, the misfolded zombie-like version of proteins that force their normal counterparts to become misfolded as well, which then destroys the brain. Prion diseases can emerge spontaneously, but FFI is typically triggered by having inherited mutations that make our prions vulnerable to misfolding.
