(NEW YORK TIMES) A large study has linked several common anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills to an increased risk of death, although it’s not certain the drugs were the cause.
For more than seven years, researchers followed 34,727 people who filled prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications like Valium and Xanax, or sleep aids like Ambien, Sonata and Lunesta, comparing them with 69,418 controls who did not.
After adjusting for a wide variety of factors, the researchers found that people who took the drugs had more than double the risk of death. The study appears online in BMJ.
