Instant Insomnia: Taking Sleeping Pills Raises Your Risk of Dying By 400%!

Zolpidem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hypnotics association with mortality or cancer: a matched cohort study.

Thank Men’s Health for alerting me to this one (yes, I get all the doctor’s magazines for free).  They emphasized that sleeping pills may shorten your life, but they didn’t emphasize that the risk was five times as great, even if you got prescribed less than eighteen pills a year.  And no, other illnesses did not explain the risk.  And yes, it was a large study.  Guess what?  Taking sleeping pills also increased your risk of cancer.

The study followed patients over an average of two-and-a-half years.

Rather than give you an abstract, the entire free article is available at the link above.  I don’t think I’ve seen as clear a sign of a need to change since the data came out about Vioxx as a risk factor for heart disease.   We aren’t putting people to sleep at night, we are literally putting them slowly “to sleep” the way we do with unwanted puppies.  Something to really keep me up at night.

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