Americans Are Getting Worse at Taking Sleeping Pills [View all]

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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/americans-are-getting-worse-at-taking-sleeping-pills/375935/

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It’s almost inevitable. Toss and turn for long enough, and eventually the middle-of-the-night bargaining will begin—If I fall asleep in the next 10 minutes, I’ll get five hours. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen minutes pass.

So what is there to do? Counting sheep is fine, if you’re relaxed by the idea of farm animals wandering around your room, but otherwise seems kind of ineffective. Warm milk’s another option, though the science on that one is a little iffy, too.

Another answer is sleeping pills. And another answer, for tens of thousands of Americans, is too many sleeping pills, according to a new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The report observed a dramatic uptick in emergency-room visits related to zolpidem, the active ingredient in Ambien and other prescription sleep aids, from 2005 to 2010 (suicide attempts, bad reactions to the correct dosage of zolpidem, and cases where people had taken the drug without a prescription were not counted). Focusing on “overmedication,” or instances where the patient overdosed solely on zolpidem or used it in combination with alcohol or other drugs, the SAMHSA found that the number of ER visits nearly doubled, from roughly 22,000 in 2005 and 2006 to just over 42,000 in 2009 and 2010.

Women in particular were especially vulnerable, making up roughly two-thirds of all zolpidem-related mishaps. Although women are only slightly more likely to use prescription sleep aids (5 percent of women take them, as opposed to 3.1 percent of men), they’re also slower to metabolize them. Last year, prompted by reports of residual next-day drowsiness, the Food and Drug Administration told sleeping-pill manufacturers to halve the recommended dosage for female patients (it suggested, but did not require, that the companies lower the dosage for male patients as well).