eli5: How does lack of sleep kill someone?
In: Biology
There’s actually an extremely rare prion disease known as Fatal Familial Insomnia. It literally takes away the brains ability to go to sleep. So much so that not even a medically induced coma was able to get a patient into a state of true sleep. According to Wikipedia, as the insomnia worsens for people with FFI, they begin to have paranoia, panic attacks and hallucinate. Once they reach the stage of the disease where sleep becomes impossible they lose weight and they mentally deteriorate rapidly. The final stage of the disease, which arrives after a couple of months of no sleep, is marked by dementia and the person tends to become mute or completely non-responsive. Death follows shortly thereafter.
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