Yummm…wait where did those pesky 10lbs come from again???

  Strange behavior by insomniacs taking prescription drugs, are on the rise. Ranging from binge eating to having sex all while asleep! These have raised safety questions about anti-insomnia medications such as Sanofi-Aventis’ Ambien.

  Researchers are studying cases where insomniacs taking Ambien got up in the middle of the night, binged uncontrollably, (either in food, or their partner) then remembered nothing of their actions the next day.

  I guess these sleep-induced side effects while on this medication have been around for years, but the incidence is rising because of an explosion in the drugs’ use is becoming and epidemic!

  Researchers haven’t found a cause for the sleep-related eating disorder, although patients with prior history of sleep-walking and women may even be at a higher risk.

  Doctors who are prescribing this medication should be engaging in discussions with their patients to describe and try to understand potential contributors to this behavior. The researchers identified 32 Ambien users who where experiencing sleep-related eating disorders with amnesia. Researches estimated that thousands of Ambien users in the U.S. experience sleep-related eating disorders while taking the drug.

   And they are wondering why the US is struggling with obesity, and why we are considered to be the “fattest” country! We don’t even know that we’re getting fat, just give us a pill, and a pill for that pill, and a pill for that side effect, ohhhh boy doesn’t the list ever end???

  A study even showed that patients who took other, older sleep medications didn’t experience the disorders. So why is Ambien still in the market?

  About 30 million people in the United States take sleep medications, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. By some counts that is a 50 percentile jump since the beginning of the decade. Ambien is boasting 12 BILLION nights of patient use!

  Some of the most serious side effects are short-term memory loss, and accidents involving patients who drive the next day, while still feeling drugged. (I love how we know all this information and yet ‘we’ continue to take/supply these yummie little pills)

  “Patients who have engaged in this unusual behavior at night – it’s relatively rare and bizarre,” said Donna Arand, president of the American Insomnia Association.

  “The daytime sleepiness – that drugged feeling that people may have – is probably the most worrisome because of the (vehicular) accidents that can occur.” (really…)

Memory Problems????

 Consumer group Public Citizen warned that Ambien should only be used on a limited basis because it causes temporary amnesia.

 Because the Food and Drug Admin’s reporting system is voluntary and anecdotal, “we don’t know how big of a problem it realty is… we have no way too accurately to assess the prevalence,” said the consultant of Public Citizen.

 Memory issues my be an infrequent side effect, but when it occurs it could be very costly! This certainly needs to be looked at in a more rigorous way. (Before you know it people who leave their kids in cars are going to say they were suffering from memory loss due to Ambien! GREAT!)

  This just in: * Doctors recommend against abruptly stopping the drug(s), which can cause withdrawal symptoms including seizures! *

 “The risk has always been there; we are just seeing it more now because so many more people are using the drug(s),” said the program director at the sleep disorder unit at the National Institutes of Health.

  And yet we still love to eat em’ up, and then when things go wrong we want to start pointing fingers, instead of doing our own research and finding out exactly what we’re putting into our bodies!