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Those Sleeping Pills May Be Killing You
dstates writes "A recent article in in BMJ Open reports a strong association between the use of prescription sleeping pills and mortality. The study used electronic health records for 2.5 million people covered by the Geisinger Health System to find 12 thousand who had been prescribed sleeping pills and a matched set of controls. Death rates were much higher in the patients taking sleeping pills and the risk increases with age. Kudos to the authors for publishing this in an open access journal."
Bingo, this is like comparing the death rates of people taking heart medications versus people who don't and then claiming the medications are killing the folks when it could be that heart disease is what is killing them and the pills are not 100% effective at all times to deal with the problem.
Also, it has been proved that bad sleep is a killer by itself, so comparing the death rates of people with sleep issues who did and who did not take medications may actually show that not taking sleeping pills might kill you if you have insomnia, which is the exact opposite of what the headline is claiming.
I couldn't find anything in it to suggest they had actually done a double-blind trial, or even a half-assed blind trial, so their results are purely correlation, and not causation, despite the time they spent talking about causation. They do suggest that 'hangovers' from the drugs are a cause of traffic accidents and such, though, so they at least thought of that.
No mention about mental stability that I saw.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Most people taking prescription sleeping pills have been fighting sleep disorders for a long time, probably their entire adult lives. Getting terrible sleep for 30 or 40 years will probably increase your mortality regardless of what pills you're taking. Do the same study again only this time instead of looking at what drugs they're on, give them a sleep disorder questionnaire, drowsiness survey, and a sleep study. Then you'll have enough data that I actually care to look at your results.
Sounds to me like data mining and meta analysis, which is all the rage today.
This study followed their subjects for an average of ONLY 2.5years. They clearly didn't follow them prior to the prescriptions.
Further the "controls" were selected based on superficial categories (age, gender, smoking, body mass index, ethnicity, marital status, alcohol use and prior cancer). Nowhere near a complete list of things that keep people awake at night.
And the causation argument still is the key here, since these drugs (several common hypnotics, including zolpidem, temazepam, eszopiclone, zaleplon, other benzodiazepines, barbiturates and sedative antihistamines) are not usually prescribed for people who have no problem sleeping.
Selection of controls was really the weak point here.
If you are under enough stress, or have some other problem keeping you awake, its as likely those issues are to blame as the use of these drugs. The headlines could just as well have been "Trouble Sleeping may be Killing you".
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.