editorial comment Of course, being "addicted" to a benign substance is much, much worse than not sleeping...

Doctors prescribe potentially addictive drugs nearly half the time when patients seek help with a sleep disorder, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

Older patients and those with publicly funded health insurance plans were nearly twice as likely to get prescriptions for cheap benzodiazepines -- the class of drugs that includes Valium, the researchers found.

"Some of the most vulnerable populations in the United States are at greater risk of receiving prescription sleep medication with a high abuse potential," said Rajesh Balkrishnan, a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State University who led the study.

Benzodiazepines, widely prescribed for anxiety and other stress-related problems in the 1960s and 1970s, are often still prescribed as muscle relaxants and tranquilizers. Some are also recommended for insomnia.

"Benzodiazepines are usually effective for just a few weeks when used to treat insomnia. But addiction can develop relatively quickly," Balkrishnan said in a statement.

Writing in the journal Sleep, Balkrishnan and colleagues said they looked at six years worth of data from 94.6 million office visits in the United States.

The National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey includes information on patient demographics, the reason for a visit, a patient's diagnosis, drugs prescribed and other services.

Doctors prescribed some kind of drug nearly two-thirds of the times that patients sought help for sleep difficulties, and 75 percent of the time they ordered up a benzodiazepine, the study found.

"A person can develop a strong psychological and physical dependence on these drugs (Benzodiazepines) in a short time, and experience severe withdrawal-like symptoms once he stops taking the medication," Balkrishnan said.

He found that psychiatrists were four times more likely to prescribe newer, non-benzodiazepine drugs for insomnia than family practice and internal medicine doctors.

"Psychiatrists may be more informed than other kinds of doctors about newer, non-benzodiazepine drugs," Balkrishnan said. "Or psychiatrists may see patients with more complex problems in whom other therapies such as over-the-counter medications have failed."

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