Insomnia is an elusive disease, as many have learned.  Some people take sleeping pills to deal with it.  But there is a disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia that is an extremely rare disease found in the brain.  It is abbreviated to FFI, and it is essentially found in a few people including an Italian family that descended from a man who lived 250 years ago.  His was the first case known, and in the 1990’s researchers found that it is caused by a dual gene mutation. 

It is a prion protein which results in an insoluble prion protein that regulates sleep.  In the Italian family’s case, it usually activates itself at the age of 40, and from there they just stop sleeping.  In this case, sleeping pills don’t help, and eventually they lose basic functioning skills and also eventually die of it.  When someone has this disease, they have a 50% chance of passing it onto their children, which makes it relatively common in the grand scheme of things. 

But only 40 families are actually said to have this gene running through their lines.  It has 4 stages that include insomnia resulting in panic attacks over time, and it lasts about 4 months.  Then they begin to experience hallucinations.  This is usually about 5 months.  Step 3 means they are completely unable to sleep no matter what they do, and they quickly lose weight for about 3 months.  Finally, it causes dementia and it lasts about 6 months until they die.  As you can see, this is a very unpleasant side of insomnia.