Overprescribing insomnia drugs

Doctors prescribe potentially addictive drugs nearly half the time when patients seek help with a sleep disorder, U.S. researchers have reported.

Older patients and those with publicly funded health insurance plans were nearly twice as likely to get prescriptions for cheap benzodiazepines -- the class of drugs that includes Valium, the researchers found.

Benzodiazepines, widely prescribed for anxiety and other stress-related problems in the 1960s and ‘70s, are often still prescribed as muscle relaxants and tranquilizers. Some are also recommended for insomnia.

“Benzodiazepines are usually effective for just a few weeks when used to treat insomnia. But addiction can develop relatively quickly,” Rajesh Balkrishnan, a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State University who led the study, said in a statement.

Writing in the June 1 issue of the journal Sleep, he and colleagues said they looked at six years’ worth of data from 94.6 million office visits in the United States.