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 The researchers found "barely" any link between medications that
warned about potential sleep disturbances and actual sleep problems
among thousands of people interviewed for the study.
"Sleep disturbances are a frequent problem especially in older
people and we wanted to find out whether this might be due to the
intake of sleep disturbing drugs," said lead author Anna-Therese
Lehnich, of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, in email to
Reuters Health.
She noted that in clinical trials, drugs are tested under strict
protocols, which may be different from real-world scenarios.
To see if the sleep disturbance warnings can be generalized to
everyday people, the researchers collected data from 4,221 people
ages 45 to 75 in the German cities of Bochum, Essen and Mulheim.
The data indicated which drugs the study participants took, and
whether they woke up early, had difficulties falling asleep or had
problems staying asleep. Researchers used information on each drug
to assign patients a probability that they'd have problems with
sleep.
"We found that drugs labeled as sleep disturbing . . . are not a
major risk factor for sleep disturbances in the general population,"
Lehnich said.
Even taking a number of potentially sleep disturbing drugs barely
led to more sleep disturbances, they found.
"However, the individual or a specific patient can still suffer from
sleep disturbances caused by drugs - especially drugs against
diseases of the central nervous system," Lehnich said.
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One limitation of the study is that the results are based on self
reports by the participants and not devices that track sleep, said
Dr. Sanjeev Kothare, director of the Pediatric Sleep Program at NYU
Langone Medical Center in New York City.
"Even though (sometimes) the drug will interfere with sleep, in some
patients it may not be so," Kothare, who was not involved with the
new study, told Reuters Health.
Lehnich said the results are surprising on one hand, because taking
several drugs that would disturb sleep barely led to an increase in
sleep problems.
"On the other hand, in most summaries of product characteristics you
find that 1 in 1000 or 1 in 100 persons suffered a sleep disturbance
when taking this drug, which is rather low," she said.
"Consequently, we could not expect strong effects."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1RZtfds British Journal of Clinical
Pharmacology, online June 9, 2016.
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