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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

All cause mortality is absurdly higher if you use drugs to sleep, including OTC stuff[0]. So, probably not. Almost certainly same story with other "meds" that dipshits pop like popcorn[1].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4883191/

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/news/medication/widely-used-class-drugs-l...

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> All cause mortality is absurdly higher if you use drugs to sleep, including OTC stuff[0]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4883191/

Your reference only studied people who took Z-drugs, benzodiazepines, or no medications, and says nothing about OTC sleep medications. There are no OTC Z-drugs or benzos on the market.

The paper also notes that only chronic use of Z-drugs and benzos were associated with increases in mortality, and not intermittent use of Z-drugs. Even then, they issue a disclaimer about drawing such conclusions:

> In short, while no relation with mortality for intermittent users of Z-drugs was found, the current study showed that use of benzodiazepines and chronic usage of Z-drugs both were associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality. Most of the effect estimates were reduced, but remained significant, after adjusting for confounding factors (except for Z-drugs). However, the low numbers of individuals reporting chronic usage indicate that the data should be interpreted cautiously.

You didn't read the papers. Anyway, the literature is chock full of "sleeping pills associated with early death." Whether the pills are causing it, or because people with deadly sleep apneas pop a lot of pills is really pretty irrelevant: take home is the pills ain't helping you, so you better get serious about fixing things.

All cause mortality of getting 5 or less hours of sleep a night is also about 2X though, and along with the mortality risk comes a massive decrease in quality of life. Obviously non-medical methods should be tried first (When I was having major issues with sleep I was able to get it under control with the help of a specialized therapist), but for someone who is having serious issues sleeping the pills can be the lesser evil.

"Dipshits" is an incredibly rude way to describe people who are most likely just ignorant.

Both studies say they couldn't find a cause/effect relationship, though the correlation is somewhat eye opening.

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