Fatal familial insomnia

Fatal familial insomnia is a terrifying genetic disorder and disease that seems too sensational to be real. Unfortunately, it does exist even though it is very rare. It can be found in only 40 families worldwide. FFI is incurable. The disease is a result of a mutation of a normal protein that is associated with brain tissue.

FFI is defined as a very rare autosomal dominant inherited prion disease of the brain. The disease's beginning and the patient's ultimate progression into complete sleeplessness is untreatable and ultimately fatal. The age at which the disease becomes apparent varies although it usually happens after age 30 and before age 60 with an average of 50 years old. Signs of the disease can include extreme sweating, the beginning of menopause for women and impotence for men, neck stiffness, elevation of blood pressure and heart rate, and constipation. Other symptoms of this disease include the inability to produce tears or feel pain as well as poor reflexes and dementia. Massage Training Institutes

There are four distinct stages of this disease.

1. The patient begins to have insomnia that progressively gets worse which leads to panic attacks, phobias and paranoia.

2. The patient begins having hallucinations and the panic attacks become very noticeable. The second stage lasts approximately five months..

3. Eventually the patient is completely unable to sleep. He begins to lose weight at a startling speed. This stage usually lasts around three months.

4. Finally the patient will have dementia and will be unresponsive and mute. This stage can last up to six months. The patient will ultimately die. Massage therapy courses

While there is no cure, there is also no known treatment for this disease. Gene therapy has been unsuccessful. Treating the symptoms is the only way to improve the quality of life for the patient at this point in time.

Some diseases that are related to fatal familial insomnia are kuru, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also called “mad cow disease”) and chronic wasting disease in Elk and Deer in the United States and Canada. Also CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) is related through the involvement of the mammalian prion. These diseases are transmissible through contact with infectious tissue, transfusion, or transplantation. Ayurveda in india

Because the disease is so rare and occurs in so few people, it is extremely hard to find a cure. In one Italian family, there were many instances of this disease, traceable back to the 1760’s. The family was decimated by this disease. An author by the name of D.T. Max wrote a book about the family and the disease called, “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep” in 2006. It remains to this day one of the best inside looks you can get at the disease, from a family who lived, and died, because of FFI.