Insomnia

[merylg]

Maybe studies on Familial Fatal Insomnia will give some insight into insomnia in general. Maybe ME/CFS patients should have access to genetic testing for this condition.

It's interesting that some common drug treatments, tried in Familial Fatal Insomnia, do not help & are actually detrimental.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia

I personally am finding insomnia devastating.

 

[merylg]

"We now know that Fatal Familial Insomnia is a prion disease. The term prion was coined by Stanley Prusiner in the 1980s as the name for an infectious agent. Specifically, a prion is a mis-folded protein that permanently affects the structure of the brain. Prions are responsible for the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans.

In FFI, prions eat away the thalamus region of the brain, responsible for regulating sleep and various sensory and motor systems. This increasingly prevents the sufferer from losing consciousness - although their EEG readings show signs associated with REM sleep during waking hours: they are so sleep deprived, they are dreaming while awake.
Because Fatal Familial Insomnia is genetic, there is a 50% chance of a parent passing it on to their offspring. The tragic thing is, the symptoms don't show until after the child-bearing years are over (typically over 40 years), so parents usually pass on the defective gene without realizing.
Fortunately, a diagnostic test is now available, but there is no known cure for FFI. The only hope is that gene therapy will offer a solution to future generations."

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/fatal-familial-insomnia.html