Word: ambien
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Every once in a while, a story about a bizarre pharmaceutical side effect races through the media like a brush fire on a dry, windy day. This time the blaze is coming from the hot-selling sleeping pill called Ambien and its apparent ability to compel some users to eat voraciously in their sleep. Never mind the fact that this particular side effect is seemingly rare--or that it was first reported four years ago. Thousands of sleep-deprived Americans are now wondering if Ambien could turn them into mega-munching zombies...
...news, such as it is, is that researchers at a Minnesota sleep-disorders center are going to publish a paper in which they have identified a few dozen people who, after taking Ambien, developed uncontrollable urges to eat while they were asleep and didn't remember their feeding binges when they woke up. Meanwhile, in the popular press, there are sporadic accounts of folks driving their cars while under the influence of Ambien and even some claims of sleepwalking that turned into sleep driving...
...good to have an internist like Dr. Donna Sweet of Wichita, Kans., for a physician. "We're talking about a study with 32 people," says Sweet, who also chairs the board of the American College of Physicians. "I tell my patients, 'If you've done well on Ambien in the past, you'll continue to do well on Ambien. You're not going to suddenly start eating in your sleep...
That view is echoed by Dr. Michael Silber of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "It's certainly a minority of Ambien patients who develop problems with sleep eating," says Silber, who first described the effect in a 2002 research article in the journal Sleep Medicine. It generally disappears after the patients stop taking Ambien and--significantly--can also occur in folks who don't take Ambien...
...sleep driving (as opposed to driving under the influence), Silber, who has been doing sleep research for 15 years, has never personally seen a case, either in Ambien users or nonusers. "Not that it doesn't happen, but sleep driving is very, very rare," Silber says. By contrast, he says, sleepwalking probably affects 1% to 2% of the population...