# NY Times article on fatal familial insomnia **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 7, 2001, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ny-times-article-on-fatal-familial-insomnia/64591 "2001-05-07T02:08:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2001, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ny-times-article-on-fatal-familial-insomnia/64591/1 "2001-05-07T02:08:51Z")
A compelling article on this subject is in this week’s magazine: > **[3. CASE STUDY: FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA; LOCATION: VENICE, ITALY; To Sleep No...](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/magazine/3-case-study-fatal-familial-insomnia-location-venice-italy-to-sleep-no-more.html)** > > D T Max reports on case of Italian family afflicted with fatal familial insomnia, genetic disease that was not formally identified until 1986; FFI, as disease is known, is astonishingly rare; sometime in their 50's, half the members of aristocratic... Free registration may be required. The doctor studying this disease discovered that it is caused by prions, similar to mad cow disease. I’m posting this because we’ve had a few threads about longest times without sleep and I thought people would be interested. (I thought Cecil or the staff had done an article about maximum times without sleep, but I couldn’t find it in the archives.) ---
**Author:** ![JillGat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9fc29f/32.png) [@JillGat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JillGat)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2001, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ny-times-article-on-fatal-familial-insomnia/64591/2 "2001-05-07T03:14:04Z")
Cecil has written several columns about sleep. Here’s one of them (mentioning a woman who claimed only to need one hour of sleep a night:[Why do we sleep?](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_044b.html)