Study finds prescription sleep medicines may not be beneficial long term
An estimated 9 million Americans turn to prescription pills when they can’t sleep, but a new study of middle-aged women finds taking the drugs for a year or longer may do little good.
Comparing a group of about 200 women who were medicated for sleep problems with more than 400 women who had sleeping problems but did not take medication, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that sleep medications don’t seem to be beneficial for long-term use. After one or two years on sleep medications, the women in the medicated group did not sleep any better or longer than those who weren’t medicated.
“The simple conclusion is that long-term use of sleep medications does not have a clear benefit with respect to chronic sleep problems,” said study author Dr. Daniel Solomon, a rheumatologist and epidemiologist.
While Solomon typically does not focus on issues related to sleep, he was inspired by years of seeing patients who struggle with insomnia. “I might give a patient a week of medicine for sleep, and sometimes they end up coming back with long-term use, and they’re still complaining of sleep issues,” he noted.
The findings stemmed from a U.S. National Institutes of Health database that has followed thousands of women to look at how middle age and menopause affect their mental and physical health. Menopause is well-known for causing sleeplessness.
Since the study primarily consists of yearly checkins with the participants, it can only show how these medications worked over the long term. However, clinical trials support that for a short time, these drugs do help people sleep.
“There are good, randomized controlled trials that say that sleep medications help over a few weeks or months,” Solomon said. “But it turns out that about 35% to
40% of people who start on them are using them a year later. So the typical way that they’re used – i.e., chronic – hasn’t been well studied in trials.”
The new report was recently published online in the journal BMJ Open.