(A humorous poem we used to say when I was a little child.)
It has become a kind of an old cliché. But is it true? Can a person literally die from lack of sleep? And if they did, what would they ultimately die from?
Well, there is the rare Fatal Familial Insomnia, but that only occurs in about 40 families world-wide.
The biggest risk of dying from lack of sleep occurs when one is so tired they doze off behind the wheel.
It seems so:
Not convinced that lack of sleep was the primary cause though.
BTW - we used to say:
Mary had a little lamb,
his feet as black as soot.
And everywhere that Mary went,
his sooty foot he put.
I’d never heard that people could die directly from lack of sleep, but I have read that extensive lack of sleep can lead to hallucinations and insanity.
And 2 (IIRC) cases ever recorded of sporadic familial insomnia.
There’s a great book about that disease, called “The Family That Could Not Sleep”, or something like that. It’s a horrible, horrible disease, and it is fatal, after many years of increasingly miserable sleeplessness. I don’t recall what the exact cause of death was determined to be.
But it is a peaceful death, unlike the 40 screaming passengers.
I wish I could die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather ; not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car - Emo Phillips
Rats have been demonstrated to die when deprived of sleep for 11 or more days, but the exact mechanism by which death occurs is not known.
Certainly not a real cite but on a recent documentary dealing with Navy Seal training one of the instructors said of hell week (paraphrasing), “We only keep them up for 120 hours because studies have shown that, any longer than that and they, well you know, die”. Even during hell week they get a few (3-4 total?) hours sleep.
Back in HS a scientist demonstrated how rats can die when deprived of sleep. But it was because the rats were injected with speed and kept in a cage with other drugged rats. They all died because the speed kept their little hearts racing. Another drugged rat who was kept alone in his own cage did not die.
The experiment was supposed to demonstrate the deadly possibilities of speed.
I just watched the PBS special on the history of the Navy SEALs. One segment talks about “hell week” during their training, during which they are sleep deprived, physically strained to their limits and beyond and subjected to tremendous stress. One of the interviewed trainers stated that the trainees only got about 3-4 hours sleep during the entire time, and that the only reason they let them get that much is that without it there is a danger of death occurring. But perhaps that’s due to an accident because of being disoriented and exhausted, and not directly due to sleep deprivation.
I saw this show about Navy SEALs … 
Except the article has said no one has ever died from lack of sleep which is false.
It doesn’t say that. What it says is:
If you know of a specific case that refutes that, please provide a cite. (I assume they are referring to direct, demonstrated effects, rather than accidents that resulted in death.)
I don’t know about the lack of sleep issue. But the poem version we used was:
Mary had a little sheep,
With the sheep she did sleep,
The sheep turned out to be a ram,
Mary had a little lamb.
Well, there was this guy:
How about anyone with fatal insomnia, either familial or sporadic as referred to previously in this thread. The most famous case would be Michael Corke. In fact it was discovered in Venice in 1765 because of the death of someone who hadn’t slept that now looks like FFI. In all of these cases, it was the lack of sleep - or rather no sleep - that killed them.
Well, maybe. Thing is, an active prion disease was frying the brains of these poor bastards. Was the cause of death sleep deprivation, or was sleep deprivation a symptom of the underlying (and, eventually, fatal) neurological condition?
In order to conclude that sleep deprivation is fatal in itself, we’d really want to see case studies in neurologically healthy people.