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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Once every three days (or more), their dementia risks rose by 54% compared to people who did not take these types of medications.The links between these OTC drugs and dementia are far from certain. A more recent study from the UK turned up only “tentative” links, and its authors stated that more research is needed. “But the only way to 100% attribute a health issue to any specific treatment is through a randomized trial,” Maust says, referring to an experiment in which one group of people is given a drug and another is not. (To his knowledge, these studies are not being done.)Prescription sleep aids carry their own risks. “There are new reports of side effects coming out on a yearly basis,” says Kari Mergenhagen, a clinical pharmacist and adjunct instructor at the University of Buffalo. (Mergenhagen was also a co-author on the Veterans Affairs sleep-aid study.) Headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting and hallucinations are a few of the short-term concerns associated with hypnotics—a class of prescription drugs designed to induce sleep that includes Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata and other popular meds, she says.Mergenhagen says it’s very difficult for researchers to nail down the long-term risks associated with regular use of these drugs. One observational study published in 2012 in the BMJ looked at electronic medical records data from more than 30,000 adults and the usage of common hypnotics, including zolpidem (sold under the brand name Ambien and others), temazepam (Restoril), eszopiclone (Lunesta), zaleplon (Sonata) and other barbiturates, benzodiazepines and sedative antihistamines. The researchers found that those who were prescribed more than 132 doses of these hypnotic drugs per year—meaning those patients taking them at least every two or three days—had a 35% increase in cancer risk and a five-fold jump in risk of death compared to those not prescribed these drugs. Even people who took these drugs sparingly—like once every few weeks—were more likely to die than those who did not take them at all.The authors of the study tried to control for pre-existing medical conditions and other factors that could explain why people taking these drugs died or developed cancer at higher rates than non-users. The drugs were also associated with car accidents, falls and depression—all of which could explain the elevated mortality risks. But the risks remained. The authors also found associations between the use of hypnotics and specific types of cancer—notably, lymphomas and cancers of the lungs, colon and prostate—but they did not offer any cause-and-effect mechanisms that might explain the links. More recent research, in both people and animals, has turned up more preliminary links to cancer.The drugs are only meant to be used sparingly. The prescribing information for Ambien notes that the drug’s use should be
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