Indonesian girl with rare ‘Sleeping Beauty Syndrome’ hit with another days-long slumber
An Indonesian teenager who can sleep for weeks on end has been taken to the hospital again.
17-year old Siti Raisa Miranda, or Echa, has a rare medical condition formally called Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS) where she can sleep for days and weeks without being woken up. Her condition first received public attention in 2017 when Echa slept for 13 days, concerning her parents who eventually had her diagnosed.
Since KLS is an episodic condition, her parents shared that Echa is just like any other teenager when it doesn’t hit her.
"If it weren't for the syndrome, everything would be normal,” her father, Mulyadi Miranda, shared.
"She'd go to school and play with her friends. Even during the pandemic, she was doing pretty well in her online lessons and classwork. But once the sleep hits, it just ends up like this.”
Echa was only 13 when she first slept for a week. She’s now 17, and her parents still need to feed her and change her clothes when she experiences the deep levels of grogginess.
"Saturday night, the condition was still guring (asleep), then we took her to the hospital for inpatient care. For three days at Ansari Saleh Hospital this child had not yet woken up. [We] finally brought her home, because the results of the medical examination were normal.”
With KLS being an extremely rare medical phenomenon that only affects one in 1 million individuals, there is no cure just yet on how it can be managed. In order to prevent the next episode, patients are usually prescribed medicine to reduce their overall drowsiness—though it can happen suddenly.
Per Healthline, common symptoms include extreme sleepiness and excessive eating. People with KLS can usually sleep from 20 hours a day to even months during an episode, with little to no memory of what happened during the time. Those experiencing mild episodes can still get up to use the bathroom and/or eat, but then they feel so fatigued that they go right back to sleep.
There's no update just yet if Echa has woken up from her latest episode.
Photo from Ketut Subiyan via Pexels