Don't Lose Sleep Over Ambien Reports: Experts

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According to Dr. Michael Thorpy, director of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Medical Center, in New York City, specialists have long known that risks for sleepwalking and other "parasomnias" rise whenever people take a sleeping pill.

Sleepwalking occurs when the brain doesn't catch up with the body as it emerges into wakefulness. "These parasomnias are related to the amount of time people have been in fairly deep, slow-wave sleep," he said. "So, if a sleep agent makes you sleep more consistently, with less arousals, you're more likely to have more of these behaviors."

In fact, the package insert that comes with Ambien mentions parasomnias as a rare but potential side effect, along with temporary memory loss.

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According to Arand and Thorpy, there's no hard evidence that Ambien users are more likely to experience parasomnias than people who use other sleep aids. "Maybe there is something specific that makes Ambien more likely to produce this type of behavior than other hypnotics, but that's hard to tease out at this point, because it's by far the largest medication used out there," Thorpy said.

But another expert, whose team has studied the phenomenon of Ambien-linked binge sleep-eating, takes a less ambivalent view.

"There's little doubt in my mind or those of my colleagues that Ambien can do this," said Michael H. Silber, co-director of the Mayo Clinic's Sleep Disorders Center, and president-elect of the AASM. "I don't think it's common, I think it's a very small minority of patients with Ambien who do it. But since this publicity has come up, I've had two e-mails in just the last 24 hours from patients who said they never realized what it was until they read the reports."

In sleep-eating, individuals gain weight after repeated binge-eating at night, with no recollection of having done so when they awake. "We've had patients who, as soon as they started using Ambien, started sleep-eating," Silber said. "Then they stopped Ambien and the sleep-eating went away. We first published on this a few years ago, and in the five years since, we have not seen it with other sleep medications."

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