Fatal Familial Insomnia - Normal Sleep and FFI

Normal Sleep and FFI

Normal sleep has different stages that together last 90 to 100 minutes:

  • REM-sleep when dreams occur.
  • Non REM Stages 1 and 2: Light sleep NREM-sleep
  • Non REM Stages 3 and 4: Deep slow wave sleep

REM is most important for health, followed by stage 2. Most reviving and repairing processes of the body are believed to happen during these two stages. FFI patients cannot go past stage 1 and thus their brains are not getting the rest they need to revive. Prolonged REM-sleep deprivation is the eventual cause of death.

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