Take advantage of natural sleep science

By Robin Lloyd

updated 7:05 p.m. ET March 23, 2006

Many Americans are sleep-deprived zombies, and a quarter of us now use some form of sleeping pill or aid at night.

Wake up, says psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California at San Diego. The pill-taking is real, but the refrain that Americans are sleep-deprived originates largely from people funded by the drug industry or with financial interests in sleep research clinics, he says.

"They think that scaring people about sleep increases their income," Kripke told LiveScience.

Thanks to the marketing of less addictive drugs directly to consumers, sleeping pills have become a hot commodity, especially in the past five years. People worldwide spent $2 billion on the most popular sleeping pill, Ambien (zolpidem), in 2004, according to the BioMarket, a biotech research company.

Earlier this month, it was reported that some Ambien users are susceptible to amnesia and walking in their sleep. Some even ate in the middle of the night without realizing it.

Global sales for all sleeping pills, called hypnotics, will top $5 billion in the next several years.

The number of adults aged 20-44 using sleeping pills doubled from 2000 to 2004, according to Medco Health Solutions, a managed-care company. Sleep problems are commonly reported in the elderly, but the increase in spending on sleeping pills was highest in this period for 10- to 19-year-olds, possibly due to an association with medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Sleep on this
Still, more sleep is no guarantee for overall health, and more sleeping pills might not bring on either.

A six-year study Kripke headed up, involving more than a million adults ages 30 to 102, showed that people who get only six to seven hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get eight hours of sleep.  The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says.

Those who took sleeping pills nightly had a greater risk of death than those who took them occasionally, but the latter risk was still 10 to 15 percent higher than it was among people who never took sleeping pills. Sleeping pills appear unsafe in any amount, Kripke writes in his online book "The Dark Side of Sleeping Pills."

"There is really no evidence that the average 8-hour sleeper functions better than the average 6- or 7-hour sleeper," Kripke says. His view is based on his ongoing psychiatric practice with patients — along with research, including the large study of a million adults (called the Cancer Prevention Study II).

He suspects that people who sleep less than average make more money and are more successful. 

The Cancer Prevention Study II even showed that people who have serious insomnia, or get only 3.5 hours of sleep per night, live longer than people who get more than 7.5 hours.

And there are questions about the effectiveness of sleeping pills.  A study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School found that a change in sleep habits and attitudes was more effective in treating chronic insomnia, over the short- and long-term, than sleeping pills (specifically Ambien).

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