The sleep deprivation has been rising for a long time as an effective method of torture capable of leading a person to the most absolute exhaustion and even death.The CIA, for example , I carry it out after 9/11 calling it “white torture.” Normally, prisoners are forced to stand or in any other uncomfortable unnatural posture where they cannot get rest.Disruptive stimuli such as loud sounds or intense lights are applied to them.to prevent sleep.
What happens when a person is deprived of sleep for a long time? Gradually, he will lose many of his cognitive abilities, hallucinations appear until his body and functions begin to weaken.
But what if we told you that he doesn't Do we need to resort to "white torture" to feel all these horrible processes? Fatal family insomnia is a disease that has almost the same realities, and worse, because its outcome is usually terrible: deadly. Let's talk today about this curious disease.
Fatal family insomnia or inability to sleep
The first time we talked about lethal family insomnia (IFL) was in the late 80s. neurologist Elio Placesi He described it in 1986, after trying to treat a woman who suffered from a very unusual type of insomnia.A lack of sleep was joined by anxiety, fatigue, memory loss...Dr.Placesi could see that his patient's sleep rhythms used to decompensate very often, exchanging in sleep-wake cycles, through which the person never got rest.
His condition was worsening, soon after, a severe tachycardia appeared a and gait disorders, leading to severe dementia, coma and finally death. He could not do anything.Terrible, right? That's right, it is known, in fact, that it is a disease classified as "rare", in addition to hereditary .It is suffered today by 100 people worldwide , of which, about 40 are located in the Basque Country, Spain, it usually appears at the age of 50, from night to morning and without hardly realizing it.Without knowing how, insomnia appears in our lives to turn on that perpetual alert switch, which will no longer allow us to rest anymore.
Insomnia is progressive and intractable, first appears nervousness, anxiety, extreme tiredness...Then our cognitive functions go away slowing down until it goes out like a candle that is consumed by pure exhaustion.Endocrine alterations, heart problems and dementias, which day after day will lead the patient to an irremediable vegetative state , where only death seems to offer finally a needy rest.
Today patients are controlled, but in the absence of a Effective treatment should be very aware of what will happen to them and the end that awaits them.The children of people affected by lethal family insomnia (IFL) know that they have more than 50% chance of inheriting the mutation, so, in some way, we can already imagine what their day to day should look like, their thoughts and their fears.In the last few years a little more of this disease is being ascertained, it is known for example that it may be associated with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the mad cow disease), hence The European Union has deployed an epidemiological surveillance system for all these types of prion diseases, such as IFF.
Can a person then die from lack of sleep? Of course, chronic insomnia alters many of our basic functions and an example of this is this terrible disease.As you can see, depriving a person of sleep can also become a method of atrocious torture, there are all the acts carried out for the CIA and we also have that famous urban legend about the Russian dream experiment, so famous when talking about these issues.Be that as it may, we only hope that one day you will get a proper treatment for all those People affected by fatal family insomnia.So far, it seems that they can only find relief by complying with those lines that Shakespeare once left us in Hamlet: "Die...fall asleep...Sleep...maybe sound."
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Image: Berts @idar, Jesus Dominguez, Andres Nieto Porras
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