Sleep medications linked to falls in older adults--study
POSTED January 17, 2011 - 11:20 | POSTED BY neha gupta
Last edited by Silky Chandvani on January 17, 2011 - 14:05
The risk becomes significantly higher when such people wake up during night after having consumed the pills.
"If you have an individual who, even when they take their sleep medications, they wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, they need to be aware that they are at greater risk of falling," advised Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado at Boulder and colleagues.
"What this also calls for is the development of new sleep medications that are effective but are safer."
People taking the sleep-inducing drug zolpidem were found to experience a loss of balance after sleeping soon after they had taken the medicine, the study reveals.
"They are walking more slowly after they have taken zolpidem and they are more unstable," Wright said."You are much groggier, much more impaired, more than twice as bad. You are slower and you can't think as clearly."
25 healthy adults analyzed
The study, intended at evaluating the result of sleep medications on the health of older adults using them, looked at 25 healthy adults.
While a few participants were given zolpidem doses, the rest were administered a placebo on 10 occasions.
In order to measure the balancing level of the participants, a method called “tandem walk” was used wherein the participants were asked to put one foot in front of the other on a 16-foot-long beam kept on the floor with a normal step length.
The implications
Fifty-eight percent of the elderly and 27 percent of the young adults taking zolpidem were found to suffer a balance loss even after remaining awake for a 2 hour period, the study claims.
Not even one of the participants stepped off the beam prior to taking any drug, which indicated no loss of balance in the participants.
"The balance impairments of older adults taking zolpidem were clinically significant and the cognitive impairments were more than twice as large compared to the same older adults taking placebos," said Wright, "This suggests to us that sleep medication produces significant safety risks."
Also, waking up after 2 hours of having consumed zolpidem was found to increase sleep inertia and hamper working memory.
The study has been published last week in the 'Journal of the American Geriatric Society.'
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