Sleeping Beauty Syndrome

Fox News covered a story on February 9 about a fifteen year old girl, named Louisa Ball, who was diagnosed with Klein Levin Syndrome also known as Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. Sleeping Beauty Syndrome causes the person to sleep for days. Doctors do not know what causes it. Louisa Ball's sleeping problem started back in October 2000 when she caught a flu virus. She takes naps and sleeps for days at a time. The longest she has slept was thirteen days long. Louisa Ball struggles to wake up from her sleep, her parents even sometimes shake her and she still won’t awaken. She gets tired, her mind goes blank, and she becomes unresponsive before going into one of her “sleeps”. Doctors are unsure when it will end. They guess, and hope, sometime between eight and twelve years.

I found that this media repot tied in well with what we learned in chapter 4 section 3 in our books. In this section of chapter 4, the book discusses the different types of sleep disorders. The young girl, Louisa Ball, from the media report had a sleeping disorder called Klein Levin Syndrome, also known as Sleeping Beauty Syndrome that made her sleep for days at a time. Her disorder is almost opposite to insomnia, the inability to get to sleep.

I chose this media report because I found it very interesting. I have never heard of a sleeping disorder called Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. I always thought that “Sleeping Beauty” was just a fairy tale and that it was a magic spell that kept her asleep; I guess it is really much more than that. I also always thought that people couldn’t sleep for days or weeks at a time. It must do damage on someone’s body when they sleep for that long, such as making his or her body very weak. It is also sad that doctors cannot figure out what caused Louisa Ball’s sleeping disorder and cannot give her a cure.