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Ambien

Stressed Out? Problems Sleeping? Taking These May Kill You

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sleep hynotics increase risk of death
Photo courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/hopkinsii/

The typical answer for sleep problems or anxiety is medication. But in no way do these drugs actually fix anything.

Rather, the underlying brain damage that stress causes is allowed to run amok, unchecked. And make no mistake–stress destroys your brain. Shrinks it. Kills off healthy brain cells. Shortens memory. Accompanying the brain damage is damage to the rest of your body as well. Increased risks of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

In summary, not good.

In my opinion, stress is the leading cause of sleep problems. How is your body supposed to sleep when all the cortisol-based alarms in your head are screaming that there is a saber-toothed pacing in the hallway. Managing stress is key to anxiety and sleep problems. Exercise and eating right for your body. Meditation, self-hypnosis or biofeedback for your brain.

Using medication to cover this up is a recipe for disaster and is associated with over a half MILLION deaths per year. I’ve written about this in a previous blog article that can be found by clicking here. So, with this in mind, is nothing new and just reinforces this dangerous association and puts the damaging effects of stress on your health into perspective.

Here are the details of this study looking at 34,727 patients 16 years of age and older who were prescribed anxiolytic or hypnotic drugs and followed for an average of 7.6 years:

• Most common drugs were benzodiazepines (think diazepam) and the “Z” drugs (zaleplon, zolpidem, and zopiclone – think Ambien).
• Those taking one of these drugs had a 346% higher risk of dying in the study period.
• The higher the dose, the greater the risk.
• To put in more plainly, there were about four excess deaths for every 100 patients using one of drugs.

If this was not the first study to find an association between the use of these 2 types of drugs (for anxiety and sleep problems) we could maybe blow off the results. But we can no longer ignore the fact that taking a drug in this class WILL increase your risk of dying. Period. Maybe it’s the stress or maybe some aspect of the drugs themselves. Either way, it doesn’t change the outcome. Dead is dead regardless of how it happened.

Adverse Effects of Modest Sleep Restriction – (06-01-04)

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Adverse Effects of Modest Sleep Restriction on Sleepiness, Performance, and Inflammatory Cytokines

I know I’m guilty here. We all know that sleep is very important and is a stress on the body, but to increase inflammation is definitely news to me. And considering that inflammation plays a role in just about every chronic disease we know of, getting a good night’s sleep becomes even more important. I would like to see if the use of drugs for sleep, such as Ambien, would avoid the increase in inflammatory markers since is does interfere with the deepest levels of sleep.

JCEM — Abstracts: Vgontzas et al. 89 (5): 2119 –

Read entire article here

Melatonin in Patients with Reduced REM Sleep Duration – (01-21-04)

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Melatonin in Patients with Reduced REM Sleep Duration: Two Randomized Controlled Trials

I usually hesitate to use melatonin in most cases, and would prefer valerian root and/or snacks high in tryptophan (bananas, sunflower seeds) as a first line approach. I view melatonin as a powerful hormone that has the ability to impact many aspects of physiology. However, in patients on a weird sleep schedule (midnights, travel) I have found it to work very well. Considering how many patients I see that have been given Ambien or some other such drug to sleep, the fact that melatonin induces REM sleep and Ambien doesn’t this should be a no-brainer.

JCEM — Abstracts: Kunz et al. 89 (1): 128 –

Read entire article here

MELATONIN IS HIGHLY EFFECTIVE – (07-11-05)

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Melatonin is effective for some sleep disorders

Well…I have to say that this article is probably right on for how I use melatonin in my office.  Two interesting notes–this study found melatonin effective in children and also used dosages up to 10 mg, which is far in excess of the higher levels of recommendations at 3 mg.  Also of notes was that the authors compared melatonin with Ambien and found it similarly effective–and, though not mentioned, a heck of alot cheaper (melatonin is very inexpensive).

Keep in mind as well that melatonin has some heavy research behind it for acting as a high powered antioxidant in the nervous system, which is an added benefit that I would bet Ambien can’t claim.

Read entire article here