Ambien-amnesia link no surprise to doctors
Ambien (zolpidem), a central nervous system depressant used to help people sleep, garnered unwanted attention this month with news stories about a couple of research papers showing unusual sleep actions, including walking, driving and eating, but not remembering any of it. The drug is manufactured by French company Sonafi-Aventis.
The eating aspect is well enough known that it is included as a rare side effect in the warning literature provided by the manufacturer. And the other activities while sleeping, all classified with the eating as "confusional arousals," don't come as a particular surprise to Utah doctors specializing in sleep disorders, either.
Many oft-prescribed and very helpful prescription sleep remedies "have amnesia as one of the pharmacological properties," says Dr. Robert Farney, medical director of the LDS Hospital Sleep Disorders Clinic.
It's also unclear how many people drive while they're "sleeping" under the drug's influence. The company has staunchly maintained the drug has a strong safety profile and it has reported any case it's heard of to the Food and Drug Administration, which says in turn that it will monitor the safety reports on the sleeping aid.
Jones, associate professor of neurology and medical director of the University Sleep-Wake Center at the University of Utah doesn't prescribe many sleep medications. He prefers a behavior-modification approach to resolve sleep difficulties. The "most important and simultaneously most difficult" is managing daytime stress more effectively. Unfinished psychological business and unresolved conflicts "seem to activate the wake-up system in the brain" that can make sleep elusive and unsatisfying. And when it's clear that the stress factors are not leaving, he says, it's helpful to schedule some problem-solving time in the daytime. At night, you learn to "convince your emotion-control circuits and intuition that you really don't have to stay awake" for it because you're going to work on it tomorrow and then you can relax and sleep.
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