Prescription sleep medications can help women struggling with occasional insomnia but probably won’t help with chronic sleep problems, new research finds.
Two years of data from nearly 700 middle-age women showed that long-term use of medications such as Ambien, Lunesta or some anti-anxiety prescriptions didn’t help women sleep better in the long run compared to women who didn’t use prescription pills, according to the report published Tuesday in BMJ Open.
“Long-term use of medications for sleep is not associated with reductions in sleep problems,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Daniel Solomon, a professor of medicine in rheumatology and pharmacoepidemiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We looked at women who had a similar baseline description of their sleep disturbances and compared those who were still taking the medications after two years to women who had not ever taken them, and we found no difference in sleep outcomes.”