According to the U.S. researchers, well-known sleep drugs like ‘Ambien’ can make even the healthy older people unsteady and prone to falling, confused, and stumbling when they get up in the morning. This drug also generally known as ‘zolpidem’, and marketed under other brand names, seems to have a numbing effect on a person for a minimum of half an hour after one wakes up.
It is not that researchers are asking you to avoid the medication completely; but it surely will help you to know this drug’s side effect. Falling or stumbling can prove dangerous, especially if you have taken this medication the night before and even then get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom.
If the husband and the wife both take sleep medications, it is advisable that both of them do not take this kind of a drug concurrently, especially if you are traveling and are in unfamiliar quarters.
There is clearly a need for newer sleep medicines which are effective and yet safer. The research also suggests that especially people over the age of 60 are at the risk of slow and unclear thinking after taking this medicine, when compared to people under 60, not that it did not affect the younger lot at all.
These side effects of this extremely popular medicine are temporary in nature and it is not that other sleep medications do not have any detrimental side effects.
Another sleep medication called ‘Triazolam’ which is marketed under other brand names was earlier banned in Britain for having the side effects of causing psychosis and paranoia, whereas it is continued to be sold legally in some doses in US and other places.
A nerve chemical in the brain known as GABA, affecting sleep, cognition and coordination, is acted upon by many sleep medications. If there are safer sleep medicines made to only target sleep regions, then life would get much easier for people suffering with sleep disorders.
The issue here is that researchers and scientists do not completely understand where these regions are exactly and how they all work!
