The dead of night

It is always tempting to go for what seems like the quickest and easiest fix. That’s why we have a cosmetics industry. It is why the market for duct tape will never die. And it is why when insomnia strikes the temptation is there to reach for a pill to induce “sleep” (we’ll explain those inverted commas in a moment). The problem is that short-term solutions usually have long-term downsides and a new study has revealed that the long-term downside of even occasional sleeping pill use is about as serious as you can get.

The statistics tell us that at least two million Australians suffer from insomnia. Even that figure though could be conservative as a University of Newcastle (Australia) study has found that up to 25 per cent of people endure sleeplessness on a regular basis. This is important because lack of sleep is more than just inconvenient. Sleep does more than just knit up the ravelled sleeve of care, it is a vital regenerative component of health.

Sleep is necessary for; lateral thinking, immune function, blood sugar control, and mood balance. Regenerative processes take place on the mental and physical level when you are asleep. For instance, during sleep a protein called TFF2 is secreted that heals the stomach lining and without that repair taking place then ulcers can result.

When you don’t get enough sleep you feel terrible and, frankly, you are terrible on the inside as well. No wonder then that people turn to anything that will get them a good night’s sleep. The evidence is though that trying pharmaceutical sleeping pills might not be the best option.

For a start, there is the drowsiness and grogginess that follows a night’s “rest” on sleeping pills. This happens because you don’t necessarily get into the deep phases of sleep on these pills. You are not awake but neither are you properly asleep. There can be problems with addiction and withdrawal too. Now what a new study has suggested is that even taking eighteen sleeping pills in a year has been tied to an increase in death risk.

Researchers established this by analysing data on more than 40,000 patients with an average age of 54. Of these people 10,500 were on prescriptions for sleeping pills including the newer drugs zolpidem and temazepam. The people in the study were followed for an average of two and a half years between 2002 and 2007.

The researchers looked for a link between sleeping pill use and death by any cause when compared to people not using sleeping pills and controlling for all other risk factors like smoking, age, alcohol use, body weight, and marital status.

The results showed that patients taking sleeping pills did have a higher risk of death and that the more sleeping pills that were taken, the greater the risk. People who took up to eighteen doses of sleeping tablets per year had a 3.6 times greater chance of dying than people who used no sleeping pills, people taking eighteen to 132 doses per year had a 4.43 times greater risk, and those taking more than 132 doses per year increased their death risk by 5.32 times.

The association existed regardless of the type of sleeping pill being taken. For those taking the highest levels of sleeping pills there was also an increased risk of cancer.

It might be that lack of sleep itself or the factors causing lack of sleep that are causing the increase in death risk. In fact, the fact that all sleeping pills, regardless of their mechanism of action, had the same link suggests that this might be the case. The link between dose and death risk might reflect that people with more serious problems are taking more pills.

What it does point to though, is that sleeping pills are obviously not addressing the problem that is causing the sleep disturbance in the first place and neither are they inducing genuine sleep.

If you are having sleep problems, it is worth properly investigating rather than going for a what appears to be a quick fix. Duct tape only masks cracks, it doesn’t remove them. Talk to your health professional about a whole of life approach to fixing your sleep problems. It might take a bit longer but the results could be a real eye opener (or eye closer).