Taking medications to treat insomnia and anxiety increases mortality risk by 36 percent, according to a recently published study.
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cognitive behavioral therapy
Dec
3
2010
Insomnia, anxiety medications found to increase mortality risk by 36 percent, study shows
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New research has not reproduced previous findings that suggested Chronic Fatigue Syndrome may be linked to a recently discovered virus.
The authors of the study, from Imperial College London and King’s College London, say this means that anti-retroviral drugs may not be an effective treatment for people with the illness.
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Women age 70 and older who sleep five hours or less per night may be more likely to experience falls than those who sleep more than seven to eight hours per night, according to a report in the September 8, 2008 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. The use of sleep medications does not appear to influence the association between sleep and risk of falling.
“Falls pose a major health risk among older adults and are a leading cause of death, illness and premature nursing home placement,” according to background information in the article. About one-third of adults older than age 65 experience falls each year. Insomnia and disturbed sleep as well as the use of benzodiazepines — hypnotic medications to treat insomnia — are increasingly common in older adults.
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A neuro-imaging study in the Sept. 1, 2008 issue of the journal Sleep is the first to find that cognitive processes related to verbal fluency are compromised in people with insomnia despite the absence of a behavioral deficit. These specific brain function alterations can be reversed, however, through non-pharmacological treatment with sleep therapy.
Results of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning during verbal fluency tasks show that people with insomnia have less activation than controls in the left medial prefrontal cortex and the left interior frontal gyrus, two fluency-specific brain regions. However, participants with insomnia generated more words than controls on both the category fluency task
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