Medically reviewed by Amelia MacIntyre, DO Key Takeaways Fatal familial insomnia is a rare genetic disorder that affects sleep and other brain functions.There is no cure for the disease, but research ...

Context: Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) is a genetically transmitted neurodegenerative prion disease that incurs great suffering and has neither a treatment nor cure. The clinical literature is devoid ...

Imagine insomnia so bad that you are left delirious from exhaustion — and which never gets better until eventually you die. On tonight’s Something’s Killing Me, the deadly inherited sleep disorder ...

The first sign of my father’s decline came at his lunchtime basketball game. At 66-years-old, he’d always been healthy and active. Then he tripped during a game. A few weeks later, he forgot where to ...

A family suffered from a mysterious, deadly insomnia for over 200 years. But one of them decided it was time to stop suffering in silence.

DF's resourcefulness in implementing treatment is in itself testimony to the essential preservation of intelligence in patients with FFI. Although formal neuropsychological testing was not performed, ...

There’s an even rarer variant called sporadic fatal insomnia. However, there have only been 24 documented cases as of 2016. Researchers know very little about sporadic fatal insomnia, except that it ...