Study finds link between sleeping pills and higher death risk
A new American study has found a link between the use of certain prescription pills and an increased risk of death. Presented in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Open, the findings highlight how important it is not to become dependent on the aid of sleeping pills to fight insomnia. Researchers from the United States-based Scripps Clinic Viterbi Family Sleep Center in California, and the Jackson Hole Center for Preventive Medicine in Wyoming estimate that between 6% and 10% of adults living in the United States used drugs containing agents such as eszopiclone, temazepam, zolpidem, and other barbiturates, in 2010. According to the researchers, sleeping pills may have been associated with 320 000 to 507 000 extra deaths in the United States in that year alone. Their data also indicate that the percentages may be higher in some parts of Europe. The study's figures show how patients prescribed any hypnotic had substantially elevated hazards of dying versus patients who are not prescribed hypnotics. Patients who ingest hypnotic prescriptions have a more than three-fold increased hazard of death when prescribed with less than 18 pills a year. Patients consuming prescribed pills more frequently, between 18 and 132 doses a year, were 4 times more likely to die. And for patients taking more than 132 doses a year, the risk was 5 times greater. The team compared the death rates of more than 10 500 people who received sleeping pill prescriptions with those of more than 23 600 others who had not received such medication. The subjects were matched for age, stage of health and other factors. The data also show how patients who had taken the most pills had a 35% greater chance of being diagnosed with cancer. It should be noted, however, that the risk was not higher compared with the control group before the start of the study. 'Perhaps the most striking finding was that an increased hazard for death was present even in the lowest tertile of hypnotic use, such that hypnotic drugs were associated with a 3.6-fold increased risk of dying for patients using less than 18 hypnotic pills per year,' write the authors of the study. 'Several strategies to discover biases that could account for this hazard, even at low levels of use, revealed none. Nonetheless, some residual confounding is inevitable in our results as a consequence of factors that were inadequately assessed. However, considering the minimal impact of the major confounders for which we did control upon the hazard ratios, we think it unlikely that confounding explains the high mortality that we found associated with hypnotics.' Several American doctors believe a randomised controlled trial should be performed to determine the certainty of death risk triggered by sleeping pills. The authors write: 'No such trial has ever been mounted, perhaps for reasons similar to the absence of randomised trials of cigarettes and of skydiving without parachutes.' The study also found that some patients who take pills sleepwalk and consume food at night. This leads to poor diet and obesity, according to the researchers. Intake of pills may also shorten life, increase depression, and interfere with motor and cognitive skills.For more information, please visit: BMJ Open:http://bmjopen.bmj.com/
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