Eye openers about sleeping pills

For a considerable number of people older than 65 who have problems falling or staying asleep, the best remedy may be a warm bath or the time-honored glass of milk before bed rather than taking a sleeping pill. Sonia Anoli-Israel and her colleagues at the University of California at San Diego observed and analyzed the sleep of 427 people ages 65 or older over a four-year span. Just under one-quarter suffered from sleep apnea, a disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops for up to several minutes at a time during sleep.

Over one-third of the sleeping pill prescriptions in the United States go to people older than 60, points out Anoli-Israel. If nearly 25 percent of them have sleep apnea, she says, "this is a dangerous situation." Sleeping pills prolong periods of non-breathing through their sedative effect, she explains, and make it harder to awaken after an episode of breathing cessation. Biofeedback techniques or a glass of warm milk, which contains a sleep-promoting amino acid called tryptophan, are better alternatives, she says.

Furthermore, says Cheryl Spinweber of the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, sleeping pills can affect the short-term memory of people of all ages and make it harder for a person to awaken in response to a noise such as that produced by a smoke alarm.

Spinweber and her co-workers administered a commonly used sleeping pill, triazolam, to young adult males for 12 consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory, while other subjects received a placebo for the same period. All of the subjects had experienced persistent trouble getting to sleep. Triazolam reduced by about 30 percent the time it took them to nod off and increased their total sleep time. But tones produced in the lab had to be much louder to bring triazolam subjects out of their sleep. Upon awakening in the morning, they also had poorer recall for words that had been shown to them the night before.