A new study reports that sleeping pills, even after their effects should have worn off, may raise the risk of an accident as much as having too much to drink.
Researchers at the University of Washington’s School of Pharmacy studied the medical and driving records of people who took any one of the three popular sleeping aids between 2003 and 2008 and found they had anywhere between a 25% and three times higher risk of being involved in an accident while driving, according to an NBC News report.
The study found that people who took Restoril had a 27% higher risk of being involved in a crash over the five years studied. People who took trazodone, or Desyrel, had nearly double the risk, and Ambien users had the highest risk—they were more than twice as likely as nonusers to have a car crash over the five years, the article notes.
“These risk estimates are equivalent to blood alcohol concentration levels between 0.06% and 0.11%,” the researchers wrote. The legal limit in the United States for blood alcohol is 0.08%.
These drugs stay in the blood for a long time, researchers say. “And so, they can have a variety of impacts on risk of crash, including people waking up in the middle of night without knowing it and driving, or waking up in the morning and driving to work and being slightly impaired by the medication still,” says Ryan Hansen, who led the study. “These drugs can make you slow to react to complex situations in driving.”
At least 8.6 million Americans take prescription sleeping pills and between 50 million and 70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders or sleep deprivation, according to the Institute of Medicine.
