Don't Lose Sleep Over Ambien Reports: Experts

Incidents of driving, eating while asleep are troubling, but very rare

By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter

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MONDAY, March 20 (HealthDay News) -- A Colorado woman becomes violent after police find her driving in winter in a nightdress, then urinating at an intersection.

A woman in Florida balloons from a size 1 to a size 12 after years of getting up at night and binge-eating.

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A Tampa Navy intelligence officer is handcuffed and threatened with dishonorable discharge after shoplifting DVDs from her base's exchange.

All of these incidents, reported last week in the New York Times and the Washington Post, shared one thing in common: The person involved claimed to have been sleeping through it all after taking the popular prescription sleep-aid Ambien.

Most said they retained little or no recollection of the events in question.

These and similar recent media reports of other bizarre behaviors while using Ambien have raised fears among the millions of Americans who take the drug hoping for a good night's rest.

According to experts, those fears may be largely unfounded.

"It may seem like there's an explosion of these cases, but when you've got 26 million prescriptions written and just 48 reported cases to the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] -- most of which involved inappropriate use of the medication -- the numbers are extremely small," said Donna Arand, clinical director of the Kettering Sleep Disorders Center in Ohio, and a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM).

The numbers she quoted come from the FDA's adverse events reporting database, which has tracked patient reports of medication-associated sleepwalking since 1997.

Based on those numbers, Arand said she believes that, "overall, the medications that are available are safe for almost everyone."

Experts note that Ambien and its two newer rivals in the billion-dollar sleep-aid market, Lunesta and Sonata, all work in much the same way, binding with the benzodiazepine receptor on the surface of brain cells that help control the sleep/wake cycle.

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