Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article. In this article, I will be assessing the effectiveness of sleeping pills. To do so, I will first explore the causes and treatments of insomnia, before discussing sleeping pills and evaluating their effectiveness.
Insomnia is a condition which means you are unable to fall asleep at night or get enough good-quality sleep, regardless of how tired you are. Common symptoms of insomnia include waking up frequently during the night, not feeling refreshed when waking up, waking up too early in the morning and daytime fatigue.
Insomnia has several causes. Some of the most common causes of chronic insomnia are anxiety, stress and depression. There are also other emotional causes including grief and worry. Additionally, insomnia can also make these emotional and physiological problems worse, which makes it harder to sleep. As such, unless insomnia is cured, this cycle can be incredibly bad for one's mental and physical health.
In addition, insomnia can also be caused by other sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, as well as certain prescription medications (including high blood pressure medications and antidepressants) and disruptions to the circadian rhythm (e.g. due to jet lag or not going to sleep at the same time every night). Further, medical conditions, including kidney disease, obesity and Parkinson's disease can also result in insomnia.
Children can also have insomnia. While this is often because of the same reasons as adults, it is usually caused by stress, medications, psychiatric disorders or excessive caffeine intake. Consequently, if children are finding it hard to sleep, then it is a good idea to restrict their caffeine intake, especially in the evenings. Further, children often benefit from having a consistent evening routine and going to sleep at the same time each day.
One of the best ways to cure insomnia is to try and figure out its causes. For example, if one's insomnia is caused by stress or anxiety, then it may be worth trying to find ways to reduce stress in life. Further, if the insomnia is caused by reactions to the patient's other medications, then it may be worth switching to other medications.
In the UK, GPs can also refer patients for cognitive behavioural therapy to treat insomnia. Cognitive behavioural therapy is a type of talking treatment, in which the patient takes with a therapist about the problems they are having. The therapist then helps you break your problems down into smaller, manageable sections and talks to you about how each individual part effects you. They then help you to change your behaviour and solve these problems.
While cognitive behavioural therapy can't cure physical problems, it can help you cope with your symptoms and improve your quality of life. As such, cognitive behavioural therapy is used to help patients with a range of conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, irritable bowel syndrome and insomnia.
Insomnia can also be cured using pharmaceutical means. In general, prescription sleeping pills work by acting on receptors in the brain and slowing down the firing of neurones. For example, some sleeping pills, such as zaleplon and eszopiclone, target specific GABA receptors in the brain. Meanwhile, others (e.g. Ramelteon) are sleep-wake cycle modifiers. These drugs work by blocking specific melatonin receptors in the brain, thus changing the circadian rhythm and promoting sleep.
According to a study published in the BMJ, around 50% of the benefit of sleeping pills is not due to their chemical properties but actually due to the placebo effect. In this study, researchers compared one of the most common forms of sleeping pill (non-benzodiazepine hypnotics) with placebos and found that, once the placebo effect is removed, the effect of the sleeping pills themselves are of "questionable clinical importance". The placebo effect is the beneficial effect caused by the fact that patients believe that the treatment will be effective - a common example of this is pain being reduced by taking a sugar pill.
This study raised many questions about the validity of research published by pharmaceutical companies who produced these drugs. Sleeping pills are a huge source of revenue for pharmaceutical companies. Indeed, according to Science Daily, the UK alone consumes £25 million worth of sleeping pills each year. As such, in the interests of transparency, researchers have recommended that, in the future, all results from such trials should be published in full, so that independent researchers can analyse the results and ensure that any conclusions reached are valid.
Taking sleeping pills may also be harmful to a person. Common side effects of prescription sleeping pills include dizziness, headaches, nausea, diarrhoea and drowsiness. In addition, sleeping pills can be incredibly bad for your long-term health. Firstly, sleeping pills don't cure the causes of insomnia - they merely help you cure the symptoms. As a consequence, if your insomnia has an underlying cause, such as anxiety or depression, then taking sleeping pills will only obscure these conditions and allow them to become worse.
Furthermore, similar to other medications, if you take sleeping pills for a long period of time, you build up resistance to them. Therefore, over time, you need a higher dose of the drugs to get the same effect and allow you to sleep. This exacerbates the side effects of taking sleeping pills and increases the risk of serious complications as a result of this treatment. In addition, the prolonged use of sleeping pills also can make patients dependent on them.
Some research also suggests that using sleeping pills improperly can result in erratic behaviour, including sleepwalking and amnesia. Additionally, they can also make people feel more drowsy the next day, worsening mood and reducing productivity. In addition, according to one study, elderly patients who took sleeping pills for a long period of time were 4 times more likely to fall than those who didn't.
As a result of these negative effects of sleeping pills, in the UK, sleeping pills are only ever prescribed for a couple of weeks, at most. Nevertheless, sleeping pills can be used effectively in cases where other treatments have failed. In these cases, sleeping pills are used for a week or two at most to re-establish normal sleep patterns.
In conclusion, sleeping pills have serious side effects and should not be taken unless necessary. Consequently, other treatments for insomnia should be tried first. If these other treatments fail, sleeping pills should be used as a short-term measure to attempt to create new sleeping habits. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies who produce reports on the effectiveness of sleeping pills should be encouraged to disclose all data collected, so that independent researchers can verify their conclusions.
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