Rare Medical Condition Affects Normal Life of a Teenager

Fifteen-year-old Stacey Comerford is like any teenager except that she experiences unusual fatigue and keeps falling asleep. What began as sleeping spells for couple of days progressively got worse, and extended to two months without a break.

The 15-year-old, from Telford, missed celebrating her birthday and could not take her exams.

Doctors have diagnosed it to be a rare ‘Sleeping Beauty’ condition, affecting about one in thousand people, called Kleine-Levin Syndrome. This condition causes her to sleep for weeks and the longest alarming episode lasted two months.  

Earlier mistaken for depression and moodiness during the teenage years, it took doctors a while to diagnose her with this rare condition even though the symptoms had begun a year ago.

There’s never any warning. I’ve even found her fast asleep on the kitchen floor. When she’s in an episode, she might get up to go to the toilet or get a drink but she’s not awake. I call it sleep mode. When she wakes, she thinks it is the following day. She doesn’t have any memory of it,” her mother said.

Source-Medindia