Sleeping medication on Health

Nowadays taking sleeping pills has become commonplace, rather than trying to find natural ways to sleep well, people are immediately prescribe sleeping pills. Nobody seems to realize that sleeping pills may have long term adverse effects on our health.

What should we be afraid?

These drugs impair alertness, and it is for example important to consider when you must drive: Do not take it before a trip, or spend driving to another driver.

They also create disturbances in short-term memory. In patients taking older hypnotic runs the risk of falls, with fracture of the femoral neck, and cognitive disorders. After 60 years a study has shown an increase in side effects, like fatigue, cognitive impairment, headaches, nightmares, nausea, with no difference between hypnotics and benzodiazepines, for a gain of sleep a half hour on average.

Side Effects

Side effects such as depression, with or without suicidal tendencies, phobic states, aggressive and violent behavior may occur in 5% of cases by Malcolm Lader, Institute of Psychiatry in London 4. Which, compared to 7 million people (figure published in 2001) in France who have using the sleeping pills, would represent 350,000 people.

"In the U.S., manufacturers have to consider status of these side effects and report the risk of depression. In several European countries on the contrary, drug manufacturers are silent about this side effect, although depression is a long-term well-documented in medical literature.

Because these reactions are often interpreted as symptoms of a worsening state of the individual, many patients become drug addicts for the same reason they have serious side effects, and, most tragically, the link between them lesbenzodiazépines long unknown and remains both the patient and the prescriber. It is urgent that the WHO and national control authorities require manufacturers to benzodiazepines a correct and comprehensive specification of these side effects.