Quarantine7 Blog Medical Information For Better Live

Fatal familial insomnia. An Italian would be the first man died for “insomnia”

It narrated in the book of the researcher TDMax the story of the first patient with Fatal Familiar Insomnia (FFI, insomnia Fatal familial) a rare genetic disease that prevents those who are carriers of sleeping up to take him to death. In the book “The Family That Could not Sleep” the author tells the story of an Italian doctor who died in 1765 which would be the first carrier of the genetic mutation that generates the disease (the so-called patient zero) and reconstructs the path through the generations of this man until the 80s.

It was thanks to a descendant of this first patient, who died just in the ’80s, it was possible to investigate more thoroughly the cause’s fatal familial insomnia. In fact this man has bravely chosen to donate his body to science because they had conducted the necessary investigations. Post-mortem analysis of brain structures has been possible to show that the pathological process of FFI is the rupture caused by a genetic mutation, the protein in the brain, which, accumulating, end up destroying the neurons. As stated Michael Geschwind, University of San Francisco, the damage is localized mainly at the level of the thalamus, a brain structure involved in regulating the sleep-wake rhythm.

The disease, described for the first time in Italy and R. Medori E. Lugaresi Institute of Neurology, University of Bologna, which would be affected forty families around the world, is hereditary and has a sudden onset and late unfortunately almost always around forty years when often they have already had children, who have a 50% chance of developing it. It characterized by a persistent insomnia, nightmares and even hallucinations, which are accompanied by autonomic disturbances and engines. This is actually a true dementia, caused by a pathological process similar to the so-called mad cow disease (BSE) that leads to death within a little over a year.

• Viva la nap consolidates long-term memory
• Baldness goodbye! From the genetic key to defeating