Many Americans are sleep-deprived
zombies, and a quarter of us now use some form of
sleeping pill or aid at night.
Wake up, says psychiatry professor
Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San
Diego. The pill-taking is real but the refrain that
Americans are sleep deprived originates largely from
people funded by the drug industry or with financial
interests in sleep research clinics.
"They think that scaring people
about sleep increases their income," Kripke told
LiveScience.
Thanks to the marketing of less
addictive drugs directly to consumers, sleeping
pills have become a hot commodity, especially in the
past five years. People worldwide spent $2 billion
on the most popular sleeping pill, Ambien (zolpidem),
in 2004, according to the BioMarket, a biotech
research company.
Earlier this month, it was
reported that some Ambien users are susceptible to
amnesia and walking in their sleep. Some even ate in
the middle of the night without realizing it.
Global sales for all sleeping
pills, called hypnotics, will top $5 billion in the
next several years.
The number of adults aged 20-44
using sleeping pills doubled from 2000 to 2004,
according to Medco Health Solutions, a managed care
company. Sleep problems are commonly reported in the
elderly, but the increase in spending on sleeping
pills was highest in this period for 10-19 year
olds, possibly due to an association with medication
for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Still, more sleep is no guarantee
for overall health, and more sleeping pills might
not bring on either.
A six-year study Kripke headed up
of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed
that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a
lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of
sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times
or more a month was not much less than the risk of
smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says.
Those who took sleeping pills
nightly had a greater risk of death than those who
took them occasionally, but the latter risk was
still 10 to 15 percent higher than it was among
people who never took sleeping pills. Sleeping pills
appear unsafe in any amount, Kripke writes in his
online book, "The Dark Side of Sleeping Pills."
"There is really no evidence that
the average 8-hour sleeper functions better than the
average 6- or 7-hour sleeper," Kripke says, on the
basis of his ongoing psychiatric practice with
patients along with research, including the large
study of a million adults (called the Cancer
Prevention Study II).
And he suspects that people who
sleep less than average make more money and are more
successful.
The Cancer Prevention Study II
even showed that people with serious insomnia or who
only get 3.5 hours of sleep per night, live longer
than people who get more than 7.5 hours.
And there are questions about the
effectiveness of sleeping pills. A study by
researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
and Harvard Medical School found that a change in
sleep habits and attitudes was more effective in
treating chronic insomnia, over the short- and
long-term, than sleeping pills (specifically Ambien).
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