Sleep Disorder Speeds Internal Clock

April 2, 2006 — -- It's 2 a.m. in Salt Lake City, Utah: While most people are in bed, dead to the world, 76-year-old Betsy Thomas is just waking up.

"It's 2 o'clock, 2 a.m.," she said on her video diary. "The time any decent person gets up out of bed, starts her day."

With little distractions in the pre-dawn silence, Thomas can pick up the mail, do a little more cooking, eat some breakfast, work on the computer, write some letters, take a long, hot bath, and do some sewing, all before 6 a.m.

"Let's go shopping," she said on her video diary.

Sleep experts say Thomas has FASPS, or "Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome" -- a fancy way of saying her body clock ticks faster than normal. And she seems to have passed on the disorder to her daughter and granddaughter.

"Their body clock is running about an hour fast every day, and telling them to wake up earlier and go to sleep earlier every day," said Dr. Louis Ptacek of University of California-San Francisco Medical School.

On the day Thomas went shopping, her daughter Candy Powell had already been up for two hours and used the time to exercise. Powell's daughter Crystal also keeps strange hours.

"Most people don't know, don't realize, the light on the vacuum comes in handy at 5 o'clock in the morning," Candy Powell said.

Thomas' sleeping pattern was analyzed for 28 days straight in the sleep lab at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York.

"She recognizes day and night differently than other people would," said Dr. Patti Murphy, the associate director of the Weill Cornell Medical Center. "Her nighttime starts earlier than other peoples' do."

That means Thomas usually is snoozing away while the night is still young for husband Walt.

But for Dr. Louis Ptacek and his team of sleep research scientists, this family is more than just a curiosity. They're a living lab. Researchers have identified a rare gene mutation that causes this sleep disorder.