Things You Don't Want - Fatal Familial Insomnia

Since it's the season of giving and receiving, one of the most talked topic of the month is "getting things". From Black Friday to "Cyber Monday", getting things for cheap is all the rage. However, while you can probably get a great deal at your local Best Buy or internet retailer that you'll love, I'll give you one thing that you probably wouldn't want, for free. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to, Fatal Familial Insominia, a disease so horrible that it'll practically turn your brain into a ticking time-bomb.

Pictured: Fatal Familial Insomnia?

Fatal familial insomnia or FFI, is one of the rarest diseases of the brain that you can inherit in the entire big, bad world. Only 40 families in the entire world have been recorded to have such disorder in which their DNA contains a mutated version of the gene PrPc. If you're in one of the lucky few families, it only takes one parent to give their offspring (You!) a 50% chance of taking on the gene and developing the disease later in life. Luckily, you can still get this disease spontaneously without any family history indicating the disorder. (In which case it would be called sporadic fatal insomnia, SFI, or extremely unlucky.)

But what does FFI/SFI do exactly? We've all heard of the words "insomnia" and "fatal", so it has to do something with inability to sleep and death, right? Right you are! You're on a roll today! But kidding aside, FFI is an incurable disease that involves a slow painful path to death. People that suffer from FFI typically have 18 more months to live before they finally succumb to the dementia-like symptoms of the disease and die.

Move unrelated.

Read more »