One of the annoyingly painful things human beings suffer is insomnia. There is nothing worse than lying awake in bed at night knowing one needs to fall asleep but understanding that for some reason or another one just would not be able to pass from wake to sleep.
Insomnia is a menace and is defined as a common sleep disorder that can make it hard for one to fall asleep or hard for one to stay asleep depending on how it happens to human body.
Insomnia can sap energy and make living life a lot more difficult. Some people only suffer from acute insomnia while there are others regularly battle with the disorder. Sometimes an underlying medical condition can be causing someone to lose sleep but in other cases, there is no explanation for long-term insomnia sufferers.
Curiously, there exists a severe lack of answers with regard to how to treat the disorder and it was this gap in knowledge that a group of scientists wanted to fill and they did explore treatment strategies.
Two primary questions pertain to treating insomnia. First, it is required to understand when hypnotics and non-pharmacological tools should be used in a clinical setting in order to alleviate symptoms of the disorder in patients. Second, efforts were made to understand if there was a strategy that could be employed to reduce or end a patient’s dependence on benzodiazepine hypnotics by using other alternative pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments for insomnia sufferers.
Essentially, what was looked at was to find sleep strategies that could be as helpful as using hypnotic drugs like benzodiazepines without resorting to dangerous drugs to ensure a patient suffering from insomnia could get a restful night’s sleep. Hypnotics are a classification of medicine used to induce sleep or improve its quality in people who normally have trouble either falling or staying asleep according to Science Direct. Unfortunately, some of these medications can have significant side effects. Benzodiazepines are a commonly prescribed hypnotic for people suffering from insomnia but the medication can lead to physical dependence and withdrawal from benzodiazepines can even be life-threatening.
The nature of the medication needed to help insomnia patients is why it is important to look at alternative methods of treatment that exclude using habit-forming drugs in the place of other hypnotics and non-pharmacological solutions like sleep hygiene.
Experts recommended a combination of pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments and advised a central nervous system-suppressing drug called Lemborexant should be used for treating insomnia. When it comes to treating a person’s ability to stay asleep, the experts recommend that a drug called Suvorexant, an orexin receptor antagonist that works by blocking chemicals in the brain, should be used as a first line of defence for patients that cannot stay asleep.
Despite recommending the use of drugs, researchers noted that strategies like sleep hygiene and preparing sleeping environment and having a bedtime routinewere important. In situations where pharmaceuticals are not warranted, the researchers recommend it is always best to use sleep hygiene education as a first-line treatment for insomnia and sleep maintenance and cognitive behavioural therapy as a second-line treatment.
When transitioning off benzodiazepines, the researchers noted Lemborexant was the best alternative for initiating sleep while Suvorexant was again recommended for sleep maintenance. Sleep hygiene education was recommended again as a helpful solution.
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