A new study shows insomnia is more persistent.
Perhaps I am growing cynical, but every time I see a new piece of research only lasting one or two years, I wonder why it stopped early. If you have a specific hypothesis, evidence for or against should be apparent fairly quickly. Anyway, the longer a trial goes on, the more difficult it gets to distinguish between potential causes and their effects. So when one or two participants develop a heart condition or get depressed, is this a side effect of the medication under test or a coincidence? But no-one is systematically collecting longitudinal data. This is very convenient for the manufacturers which might have to pull a medication from the market if adverse evidence emerged.
The final thought has to be that if you are unlucky enough to suffer from insomnia, take ambien as directed by your doctor and work intensively with a therapist or counsellor. The combination is the best chance of avoiding long-term problems.
The study shows that most of the group found the insomnia growing steadily more pronounced as the years passed. You might wonder why they were not all given ambien or an equivalent. The answer, of course, is that they were and to excellent short-term effect. Thus, even though ambien and other sleeping pills produced the promised sleep artificially, the majority of participants could not recapture the natural sleeping patterns of their youth. Curiously, women were more at risk of insomnia patterns stabilising and expanding. More worrying was that about 35% of those who had episodes of insomnia lasting more than two weeks subsequently suffered a major depressive disorder. The study concludes that insomnia is persistent and increases the risk of depressive conditions.