Anti-anxiety drugs

The Hidden Dangers of Taking Anti-Anxiety Drugs

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You’re probably familiar with the benzodiazepines diazepam (Valium), lorazepam (Ativan) and alprazolam (Xanax). They’re among the most popular drugs worldwide, prescribed most often for generalized anxiety and panic attacks. Xanax has become the fourth most widely prescribed drug in the United States, and it’s no surprise. In a nation where anxiety is as prevalent as the common cold, these medications do their job.

valium

But there is a dark side — many dark sides — that should make you think twice before hopping on the benzo bandwagon. These drugs can be used safely, but the decision to take them shouldn’t be entered into lightly.

How do benzodiazepines work?
Benzodiazepines stimulate the brain’s receptors for a chemical called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the major inhibitory neurotransmitter impacting anxiety, mood, sleep and pain sensitivity. The various benzodiazepines differ primarily in how fast and how long they act.

What are the side effects?
They can decrease your ability to think clearly, impair memory and reduce your ability to respond to emergency situations that may arise (for example, if you are driving a car or operating a dangerous piece of machinery).

These effects can be seen even in the lowest doses that are usually prescribed. In addition, a recent study found that the use of one of these drugs for at least three months increases your risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 50 percent.

In high doses, benzodiazepines can cause life-threatening respiratory suppression or result in a coma. Since 2000, the number of emergency-room visits due to benzo use has doubled. When combined with narcotics, the risk and severity of these side effects is significantly increased.

Are these drugs habit-forming?
Yes. Their continued use downregulates the brain’s sensitivity to GABA, so not only will you need more of the drug to get the same benefit over time, your baseline state of anxiety without the drug actually increases.

It can be very difficult to get off benzos once you’ve started them, and stopping can come with serious withdrawal symptoms. Insomnia, irritability, heightened anxiety, panic and restlessness are among the most common symptoms. More patients now end up in detox for the combined use of benzodiazepines and opioids than for all alcohol-related complications.

Can you use these drugs safely? Are there alternatives?
Benzos can be effective in relieving an acute panic attack or preventing one in a high-risk situation. However, there are almost always better alternatives. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like sertaline (Zoloft) and escitalopram (Lexapro) and selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) like venlafaxine (Effexor) and duloxetine (Cymbalta) are the first choice in managing generalized chronic anxiety in those patients who require medication.

In the long run, getting to the root of the problem through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), counseling and modifying your lifestyle to fortify your defenses against anxiety (getting proper sleep, optimizing nutrition and avoiding caffeine and alcohol) can have a cumulative effect that can lessen or even eliminate your need for these drugs.

Applying skills learned in CBT or using deep-breathing exercises or visualizations (there are many mobile apps that make this convenient) can abort many panic attacks before they become unmanageable. And the more you practice and use these skills, the more effective they become.

 

Anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping pills proven to kill thousands of American each year.

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People who take prescription drugs for anxiety or to induce sleep are significantly more prone to early death than others, suggests a new study recently published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). A team of researchers from the U.K. found that taking anti-anxiety medications like Valium (diazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam), or sleeping drugs like Ambien (zolpidem), are more than twice as likely as others to die as a result of the medications.

drugs

For their research, the team from the University of Warwick, Keele University and St. George’s Hospital compiled data on more than 100,000 individuals, roughly one-third of whom had filled prescriptions for one or more of the aforementioned drugs, or for other kinds of sleeping medications like Sonata (zaleplon) and Lunesta (eszopiclone). Nearly 70,000 controls who did not take the drugs, but were of similar age and practice, were also included for comparison.

After accounting for a wide variety of influencing factors like alcohol use, socioeconomic status, age and various other health and behavioral characteristics, the team observed specific dose-response associations between each class of drug and likelihood of early death. Based on the data, taking such drugs caused four excess deaths per every 100 participants; non-drugged individuals experienced fewer deaths.

“In this large cohort of patients attending UK primary care, anxiolytic [anxiety] and hypnotic drugs were associated with significantly increased risk of mortality over a seven year period, after adjusting for a range of potential confounders,” wrote the authors in their conclusion.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Scott Weich, told The New York Times (NYT) that, though imperfect, his study reiterates the extreme dangers associated with anti-anxiety and sleep-inducing drugs. A professor of psychiatry at the University of Warwick, Dr. Weich says he has prescribed many of these drugs to his patients in the past, and their dangers are impossible to overlook.

“[This research] adds to an accumulating body of evidence that these drugs are dangerous,” he is quoted as saying. “I prescribe these drugs, and they are difficult to come off. The less time you spend on them the better.”

Cannabis: the safe, effective alternative to mood pills and sleep drugs

For many people, the natural compounds found in cannabis, including the plant’s wide range of cannabinoids — cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) are among the most well known — are far more effective at alleviating stress and anxiety, as well as promoting restful sleep. And unlike pharmaceuticals, cannabis is not dangerous and does not harm the body.

A 1986 study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, for instance, found that cannabis, which is often referred to as marijuana, produces clear anti-anxiety effects in the body. Compared to controls not consuming the plant, subjects taking cannabis during this study manifested very low anxiety scores, the result of cannabis compounds interacting with the body’s benzodiazepine receptors.

Similarly, cannabis makes a far better sleeping aid than prescription sleeping pills like Ambien, as the appropriate strains act as a natural, gentle sedative to put the mind at ease. Pharmaceutical sleeping pills, on the other hand, are highly addictive, can cause extreme psychosis and dangerous behavior, and as the new UK study has shown, are extremely harmful to the body.

“One of the effects of THC administration is sedation,” wrote Karen I. Bolla, the lead author of a 2008 study published in the journal Sleep. “One group of marijuana users report… they use marijuana to help them sleep. Interestingly, the marijuana users report negligible use of alcohol, sleeping pills, or other medicines to induce sleep.”

Sources for this article include:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com

http://www.bmj.com

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

http://blog.sfgate.com

http://science.naturalnews.com

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/044761_anti-anxiety_drugs_sleeping_pills_mortality.html##ixzz2zCPiq55n

Anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping pills linked to risk of death .

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Anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills have been linked to an increased risk of death, according to new research from the University of Warwick.

The large study, published in BMJ, shows that several anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) drugs or hypnotic drugs (sleeping pills) are associated with a doubling in the risk of mortality. Although these findings are based on routine data and need to be interpreted cautiously, the researchers recommended that a greater understanding of their impact is essential.

Professor Scott Weich, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Warwick, explained “The key message here is that we really do have to use these drugs more carefully. This builds on a growing body of evidence suggesting that their side effects are significant and dangerous. We have to do everything possible to minimise over reliance on anxiolytics and sleeping pills.”

“That’s not to say that they cannot be effective. But particularly due to their addictive potential we need to make sure that we help patients to spend as little time on them as possible and that we consider other options, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, to help them to overcome anxiety or sleep problems.”

The study accounted, where possible, for other factors such as age, smoking and alcohol use, other prescriptions and socioeconomic status. Crucially, the team controlled for contributing risk factors such as sleep disorders, anxiety disorders and other psychiatric illness in all participants.

34,727 people were tracked for seven and a half years on average from the time that they first received prescriptions for either an anxiolytic or hypnotic drug.

Benzodiazepines were the most commonly prescribed drug class, including diazepam and temazepam. The study also examined the effects of two other groups of drugs; the so-called ‘Z-drugs’ and all other anxiolytic and hypnotic drugs. Many patients received more than one drug over the course of the study, and 5% received prescriptions for drugs from all three groups.

Journal Reference:

  1. S. Weich, H. L. Pearce, P. Croft, S. Singh, I. Crome, J. Bashford, M. Frisher.Effect of anxiolytic and hypnotic drug prescriptions on mortality hazards: retrospective cohort study. BMJ, 2014; 348 (mar19 5): g1996 DOI:10.1136/bmj.g1996