Should we completely ban sleeping pills?
“Occasionally, these are good medications,”
believes Joëlle Adrien, neurobiologist and emeritus research director at Inserm. Today in charge of sleep management workshops at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, she clarifies her point:
“When we use them daily, and for too long, there is inevitably an addiction which makes them less effective. There is then a great temptation to increase the doses. And if we stop, it's a horror: we don't sleep at all
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This addiction, which scientists call pharmaco-tolerance, has long been known for hypnotics from the benzodiazepine family. This is not the only one of their disadvantages. In the elderly, they increase the risk of falls.
“These medications have the disadvantage of reducing the amount of deep slow-wave sleep, which is precisely the most restorative. On the other hand, and this is a plus, they have…
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