UF study: Behavioral treatments to treat sleep disruptions more effective than sleep drugs

Aida Mallard, The Gainesville Sun
·2 min read
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The use of medication to treat sleep disturbances has fallen dramatically in the U.S. in recent years after several decades of climbing steeply, according to a study by a team of researchers led by a University of Florida Health scientist.

The study, which was published July 12 in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, documented a 31% decline in the use of common sleep medications between 2013 and 2018. The study showed an even greater decline among Americans over age 80, with an 86% decrease over the same time period.

“I was surprised and encouraged by the results because there’s been a great deal of effort to minimize the long-term use of these pharmaceutical agents,” said public health researcher Christopher Kaufmann, an assistant professor in the UF College of Medicine’s Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and a member of the UF Institute on Aging.

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Co-authors of the study also include researchers at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We’ve seen deprescribing initiatives,” Kaufman said. “A number of medical organizations, advocacy groups and policymakers have strongly discouraged the use of these drugs to treat insomnia due to potential adverse outcomes associated with their use. There are highly effective behavioral treatments available that are growing in popularity.”

While the use of sleep medications dropped across all drug classes, the study found the strongest decrease in FDA-approved medications, which fell 55%.

Behavioral treatments for insomnia are increasingly encouraged by physicians. The gold standard, Kaufmann said, is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, a program involving multiple visits to a sleep specialist to change behaviors or poor habits that cause sleep loss. Kaufmann said these behavioral treatments have been shown to be at least as effective or even more effective than sleep drugs.

This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: UF Health scientists study use of sleep medications