How do insomniacs live without sleep

Fu has subsequently sequenced the genomes of several other families who fit the criteria of short-sleepers. Stanley says that when your body gets used to the time it needs to wake up, it can use the time it has to sleep as efficiently as possible.

In fact, the amount of sleep you need is genetically determined as much as your height or shoe size. Some people need very little sleep, others need 11 or 12 hours to feel their best. Health Brain. The people who need very little sleep. Share using Email. By Helen Thomson 7th July Is it true that some people need only a few hours of sleep? Helen Thomson talks to a woman whose genes might hint at how we all could survive on less shuteye.

She went to bed around midnight and woke at 4am feeling completely alert. Why sleep is so important is still a bit of a mystery. Until recently, it looked like there was no escape from the genetic curse of fatal familial insomnia Credit: iStock. Lugaresi passed away at the end of December last year after decades of working with people with FFI, but Roiter and his colleagues at Milan and Treviso believe they may finally be close to the cure they had all dreamed of.

Last year, they announced a clinical trial of a new drug , which, they hope, may prevent or at least decelerate the formation of the poisonous prions.

Indeed, in a small clinical trial on people showing early signs of the disease, the 21 people taking the drug lived about twice as long an average of 13 months as the 78 control subjects. Disappointingly, a later study that tested the drug on patients already showing more aggressive symptoms of CJD failed to find a benefit. Roiter and his colleagues wonder if by that point, it might simply be too late to be of use. For this reason, they want to see if doxycycline may still function as a preventative treatment in people at risk of FFI, before the prions have started to amass.

First, the scientists had to genetically test each member to see who was carrying the mutation, and so should be given the active drug. From these, they selected 10 members aged 42 to 52 who might be expected to decline within the next decade. The problem was that many of the family members did not want to know the results of the test: even with the hope of the drug, the fear would cloud every waking minute of their lives.

For this reason, a further 15 members who are not at risk of the disease will also receive a sham treatment. This means that each member should have no way of figuring out the results of their test: as far as they can tell, there is less than a chance of proving positive or not.

Will a new drug release the Venetian family from the death sentence written in their DNA? Without treatment, Forloni predicts that at least four of the 10 subjects carrying the mutation would be expected to succumb within the next decade.

So if the team find that more than six have escaped the disease by the end of that period, they will consider the trial a success — perhaps justifying more widespread use. Despite the glimmer of hope it offers, the trial remains controversial among some of the doctors who have been following this family closely. Cortelli, for one, has decided not to be involved in the project because he is concerned about its ethics.

A number of studies have shown that Ambien and other shorter-acting benzodiazepines, sometimes known as Z-drugs, such as Zimovane offer no significant improvement in the quality of sleep that a person gets.

They give only a tiny bit more in the quantity department, too. In one study financed by the NIH, patients taking popular prescription sleeping pills fell asleep just 12 minutes faster than those given a sugar pill, and slept for a grand total of only 11 minutes longer throughout the night.

If popular sleeping pills don't offer a major boost in sleep time or quality, then why do so many people take them? Part of the answer is the well-known placebo effect. Taking any pill, even one filled with sugar, can give some measure of comfort.

But sleeping pills do something more than that. Drugs like Ambien have the curious effect of causing what is known as anterograde amnesia. The drug makes it temporarily harder for the brain to form new short-term memories. This explains why those who take a pill may toss and turn in the middle of the night but say the next day that they slept soundly. Their brains simply weren't recording all those fleeting minutes of wakefulness, allowing them to face each morning with a clean slate, unaware of anything that happened over the last six or seven hours.

Some sleep doctors argue that this isn't such a bad thing. Serious problems can arise, however, when people taking a drug like Ambien don't actually stay in bed. Some have complained of waking up the next day and finding sweet wrappers in their beds, lit stoves in their kitchens, and bite marks on the pizzas in their freezers.

Others have discovered broken wrists that came from falling while sleepwalking, or picked up their cell phones and seen a list of calls that they have no memory of making. Not long after a member of the Kennedy family blamed a car accident on the effects of Ambien, the US Food and Drug Administration issued new rules requiring pharmacists to explain the risk that taking certain sleeping pills could lead to things like sleep-eating, sleep-walking, or sleep-driving.

Those warnings have done little to dent the popularity of sleeping pills, especially since the most popular one is cheaper than ever. Ambien went off-patent a few months before the FDA issued its new requirements. The number of patients filling a prescription for them remained steady. Many people who take sleeping pills find that their sleep quality reverts to its previous, poor state the night they decide to go without medication, a vicious cycle that increases their dependency on a drug approved only for short-term use.

Facing a night of sleep without backup produces the same form of stress that originally caused the insomnia cycle to begin. Yet there is a way to treat insomnia without setting patients up for a letdown as soon as the prescription runs out. For more than 10 years, he has conducted studies into whether modifying behaviour can be as effective at treating insomnia as taking medication. His research focuses on cognitive behavioural therapy CBT , a treatment that psychologists often use when working with patients suffering from depression, anxiety disorders or phobias.

The therapy has two parts. Patients are taught to identify and challenge worrying thoughts when they come up. At the same time, they are asked to record all of their daily actions so that they can visualise the outcome of their choices. When used as a treatment for insomnia, this form of therapy often focuses on helping patients let go of the fear that getting inadequate sleep will make them useless the next day.

It works to counter another irony of insomnia: Morin found that people who can't sleep often expect more out of it than people who can. The most famous sleep deprivation experiment took place in when a Californian high school student named Randy Gardner managed to stay awake for hours. Toward the end of the 11 days, Gardner grew paranoid and even started hallucinating. However, he reportedly recovered without any long-term physical or psychological effects.

Sleep deprivation occurs when a person gets less sleep than their body needs. The effects of sleep deprivation can vary from person to person. Children and teenagers need more sleep than adults as their brains and bodies are still developing and growing. As such, the effects of sleep deprivation in children can sometimes be more severe or longer-lasting. For example, sleep deprivation can increase the risk of dangerous accidents. An incredibly rare sleep disorder called fatal familial insomnia FFI can also result in death.

The mutated gene produces misfolded prions that accumulate in the thalamus, which is the region of the brain that regulates sleep. There is currently no cure for FFI, and death usually occurs within 12—18 months of a person first experiencing symptoms. Most people will begin to experience the effects of sleep deprivation after just 24 hours.

In the U. People who have entered local sleep may appear fully awake, but their ability to perform complex tasks will significantly decline.

The effects of sleep deprivation intensify the longer a person stays awake.