terminal insomnia definition
Terminal Insomnia - When Sleep Deprivation Is Fatal. Terminal insomnia is a very rare but deadly condition. The two main kinds of terminal insomnia, fortunately, affect fewer than 100 people in the entire world. Fatal familial insomnia is a hereditary condition in which just one amino acid in one gene for one protein is wrong. It makes a protein in which 252 amino acids are right but 1 is wrong, called a prion. As the amount of the protein builds up over decades, it eventually has devastating effects on the brain.