In 2023, Mitchell Miller, a sleep medicine doctor based in Clearwater, Florida, received a visit from an unusual patient.

While Miller is accustomed to seeing people with sleep apnea—a persistent condition in which people stop breathing dozens or even hundreds of times during the night, causing disturbed sleep and daytime exhaustion—it is most common in men, particularly those who are overweight or obese and in their forties and fifties.

This patient was a 33-year-old woman of slight build who was also suffering from the telltale signs of daytime fatigue. Unlike Miller’s usual patients, she had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), the medical term for a group of genetic disorders