If you spend sleepless nights tossing and turning, and have ever considered or used a sleeping pill, there’s important new research that may cause you to rethink how you and your doctor address your insomnia problem.
The fact is, we are a sleepless society. 30 to 35% of adult Americans report difficulty sleeping in a given year and 10% report the insomnia to be chronic and/or severe. Many turn to sleeping pills for a solution, usually intended to be a short term fix for what is at first a temporary problem.
But the choice of pills can turn the insomnia into an even bigger health issue.
According to the latest study by Ohio State researchers in the journal sleep, those being prescribed sleeping pills are getting what many experts would consider the wrong pills.
There are very good medicines currently available for insomnia, such as lunesta and sonata, which are not addictive and habit forming. Yet, according to the research, nearly one out of two visits to the doctor’s office for help with a sleep disorder result in a prescription for medicines that used to be, but should no longer be used for insomnia: the medicines in the valium family of drugs, the benzodiazepines, or BDZ’s.
Dr. Ana Krieger, Director of the NYU Sleep Disorder Center, says, “Those are actually not approved for insomnia treatment in the US. So if they have been prescribed, they have been prescribed the wrong way.”
Nearly 100 million office visits for sleep complaints were reviewed. 2/3rd’s of them resulted in a prescription for a sleeping pill. And of these, 75% resulted in a prescription for a BDZ! The authors are calling for perhaps guidelines that would say only use a benzodiazepine in the event no other medicine works.
The reason they’re being prescribed? They’re cheap, a fraction of the cost of the non-addictive sleeping pills. In fact older individuals, and those on Medicare and Medicaid are twice as likely to get a prescription for a BDZ. And these are often the patients most susceptible to the long term addictive potential of these drugs.
When stopped, benzodiazepines results in both physical and psychological addiction; the resulting withdrawal that comes with these issues when the drugs are stopped.
And that’s why, once they’re started, it’s difficult to quit using them.
“They can lead to other issues like they sedate you too much and then you shouldn’t be driving because they are still effective in your system and you’re not awake enough to perform the daily activities,” says Dr. Krieger.
But if you do need a sleeping pill, use it for a very short period of time, and make sure it’s not a BDZ.
For more information, go to:
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/prof/sleep/index.htm#youth
http://www.emedicinehealth.com/articles/9492-6.asp