OVERVIEW

Curious Clinicians - No Sleep for the Weary (2025-2026) is organized by VCU Health Continuing Education.

Date:
Tuesday, December 16, 2025, 11:30 PM - Thursday, December 31, 2026, 11:59 PM

Description:
Why can’t people with familial fatal insomnia fall asleep?

Have you ever wondered why you feel so awful when you don’t get enough sleep? Well, that’s because it is no exaggeration when we say we need sleep to survive, so much so that we spend approximately ? of our lives sleeping. Insomnia can certainly feel exhausting, overwhelming, and even lonely – while everyone is asleep, there you are – wide awake and unable to fall asleep no matter how much you try. Except, now imagine that other members of your family were plagued with this same condition. And over time, as you remain awake for days to weeks on end, your cognition begins to decline because it has become starved of this essential bodily function. The focus of this episode is a condition called familial fatal insomnia (FFI), a rare and deadly condition that causes progressive neuropsychiatric problems.

Objectives
Upon completion of this activity, you will be able to:

Identify familial fatal insomnia as a neurodegenerative prion disease and describe how misfolded prion protein accumulation in the thalamus leads to progressive insomnia among its clinical manifestations.
Explain how prion accumulation in the thalamus disrupts the sleep–wake cycle and leads to an inability to initiate sleep.
Describe proposed mechanisms underlying thalamic specificity in prion diseases, including region-specific prion glycosylation and the presence of thalamus-specific prion receptors.
List and briefly describe current and emerging therapeutic strategies under investigation for prion diseases, including prophylactic doxycycline, epigenetic silencing of the prion gene, and CRISPR-based gene editing approaches.