Medication Causing Sleep Binges?
Popular Prescription Sleeping Pill May Be Behind Bizarre Sleep Behavior
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"A lot of times after returning to bed, I'd wake up vomiting because I had so much food in my stomach," Makinen said. "I'll probably be taking meds for the stomach problems for the rest of my life. It was like being an abused wife, you just stay with it. That's why it took so long for me to stop taking Ambien."
Like Makinen, Brenda Pobre spent years gaining pound after pound. She topped out at 346 but never thought that her sleep medication was to blame until her doctors figured it out. "It's the most frustrating thing in the world to be doing everything right to lose weight and to still have the results be wrong," she said. "After I started on the Ambien, I gained at least a hundred pounds."
Dr. Mark Mahowald at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center is studying 32 Ambien-related cases. Most of the sleep-eaters are women. Doctors aren't sure why the phenomenon seems to happen more often with sleeping pills.
"We've had people eat buttered cigarettes. We've had people make salt sandwiches," he said. "It's a release of two innate behaviors, namely sleep and eating and they're both released at the same time by the sleeping medication."
Like Makinen, Pobre took awhile to discover the root of her mysterious weight gain. But when she did, she stopped taking the drug. "It went on for a couple of years," she said. "It seems that it took forever for me to find the answers."
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