ReviewDrug safety2016
Mortality Risk of Hypnotics: Strengths and Limits of Evidence.
Review in Drug safety, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- The effectiveness of aromatic extract on insomnia: a meta-analysis.Sleep & breathing = Schlaf & Atmung · 2024Pooled it
- Comorbid Insomnia and Sleep Apnea Mechanistic Convergence, Phenotypic Heterogeneity, and Clinical Implications.Current sleep medicine reports · 2026Article
- From Therapeutic Heterogeneity to Precision Neuromodulation: Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation for Chronic Insomnia.Nature and science of sleep · 2026Review
- Infra-slow EEG neurofeedback for insomnia: a single-case experimental study in primary care.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Psychosocial characteristics of the general population who habitually use hypnotics: Results from a national survey on drug use among the Japanese.PCN reports : psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2024Article
- A novel sleep aid device to reduce sleep latency using air-COFrontiers in neurology · 2023Article
- Association of sleep disturbance with Parkinson disease: evidence from the Women's Health Initiative.Menopause (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Observational
- Article
- Observational
- Pharmacological Management of Insomnia.Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics · 2021Review
- Treatment of Heart Failure Patients with Anxiolytics Is Associated with Adverse Outcomes, with and without Depression.Journal of clinical medicine · 2020Article
- Mortality Following Nonfatal Opioid and Sedative/Hypnotic Drug Overdose.American journal of preventive medicine · 2020Article
- Policies for Deprescribing: An International Scan of Intended and Unintended Outcomes of Limiting Sedative-Hypnotic Use in Community-Dwelling Older Adults.Healthcare policy = Politiques de sante · 2019Article
- Article
- Patient Preferences for Managing Insomnia: A Discrete Choice Experiment.The patient · 2018Article
- Does a Consumer-Targeted Deprescribing Intervention Compromise Patient-Healthcare Provider Trust?Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Article
- Patterns of zolpidem use among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans: A retrospective cohort analysis.PloS one · 2018Article
- Self-Regulation of Breathing as an Adjunctive Treatment of Insomnia.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2018Article
- Article
- Predicting Future Self-Reported Motor Vehicle Collisions in Subjects with Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma Using the Penalized Support Vector Machine Method.Translational vision science & technology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sleeping pills, more formally defined as hypnotics, are sedatives used to induce and maintain sleep. In a review of publications for the past 30 years, descriptive epidemiologic studies were identified that examined the mortality risk of hypnotics and related sedative-anxiolytics. Of the 34 studies estimating risk ratios, odds ratios, or hazard ratios, excess mortality associated with hypnotics was significant (p < 0.05) in 24 studies including all 14 of the largest, contrasted with no studies at all suggesting that hypnotics ever prolong life. The studies had many limitations: possibly tending to overestimate risk, such as possible confounding by indication with other risk factors; confusing hypnotics with drugs having other indications; possible genetic confounders; and too much heterogeneity of studies for meta-analyses. There were balancing limitations possibly tending towards underestimates of risk such as limited power, excessive follow-up intervals with possible follow-up mixing of participants taking hypnotics with controls, missing dosage data for most studies, and over-adjustment of confounders. Epidemiologic association in itself is not adequate proof of causality, but there is proof that hypnotics cause death in overdoses; there is thorough understanding of how hypnotics euthanize animals and execute humans; and there is proof that hypnotics cause potentially lethal morbidities such as depression, infection, poor driving, suppressed respiration, and possibly cancer. Combining these proofs with consistent evidence of association, the great weight of evidence is that hypnotics cause huge risks of decreasing a patient's duration of survival.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.