Few people are fond of alarm clocks but Allan Todd has spent 38 years being terrified of them because he suffers heart stoppages and temporary brain death every time one wakes him up.

On countless mornings doorbells, delivery vans and even the window-cleaner sent the retired hotelier into a dead faint for more than half-a-minute. It could then be up to four hours before he could move or speak again.

After decades of narrowly cheating death, the bizarre condition - which may now be named after the 63-year-old from Scarborough, North Yorkshire - has finally been cracked by the national health service's only 'faints and falls' clinic, which won a five-star audit report from university researchers yesterday.

"I wouldn't be here today without them," said Mr Todd yesterday, patting the emer gency pacemaker which kick-starts his heart whenever it stops. "They found out my nerve-wiring was the wrong way round. Most people sit up in bed if they wake with a start. With me, the ticker stopped, I dropped on to the floor and that was me out of it altogether."

Mr Todd's wife Mary, who ran a Scarborough guesthouse with him for years, became too scared to wake him, particularly as the fainting spells be came progressively longer.

Mr Todd said: "It started out of the blue when I was 23, and I've been into our local hospital by ambulance time after time.

"The Scarborough doctors couldn't crack it. They treated me for epilepsy for 18 months and then said: we don't know what it is; you'll just have to live with it."

The condition is still partly a mystery according to consultants at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, whose clinic - which treats 3,500 older patients annually - is estimated, in yesterday's report by Newcastle University, to have saved the NHS the £2.5m cost of running a geriatric ward.

It was a Spanish doctor on the holiday island of Tenerife, where Mr Todd 'died' in his hotel after hooting traffic woke him up, who set him on the path to treatment by insisting he get a specialised 'tilt test' for blood circulation back home.

"They said there was a six- month wait in Scarborough, but luckily the doctor referred me to the Newcastle clinic," he said. "They wired me up to everything and had a nurse sit with me for three nights in their sleep unit. That's how they discovered what was going wrong."

The couple's three children had not been affected and have now been assured that the condition is not hereditary. Mr Todd, a keen golfer who is now back on the links, said: "My son asked 'is this going to land on the back of me, Dad?' and I'm very pleased to be able to tell him: 'no, don't worry, it won't'.

"They did say at Newcastle, once they'd cracked it, that it was a miracle I was still alive. Now this little pacemaker won't let my heart stop for more than one-and-a-half seconds, we've been able to tell the window-cleaner he can come whenever he likes.

"We've even got an alarm clock - one with a buzzer and a bell."