14 DAY TRIAL // A long-term study has recently revealed that people who take a lot of medication against depression and anxiety tend to live shorter lives when compared with peers who don't use such treatments.
The 12-year-long investigation was conducted in Canada, mainly on patients suffering from anxiety and depression. More than 14,000 individuals were involved in the work.
The research team behind the new effort says that participants were aged between 18 and 102, and adds that all people were traced starting from 1994. Mortality rates were the main target of the study.
A series of questionnaires was applied to each test subject once every two years. The questions sought to determine things like lifestyle, health status, and other sociodemographic factors.
Another aspect the researchers were very interested in was keeping tabs on people's drug use habits. Each study participant was asked about using drugs such as Valium or Nytol.
Prescribing tranquilizers and sleeping pills is common practice today, and very large number of people take at least one such chemical on a daily basis.
Overall, for the entire study group, a mortality rate of 10.5 percent was determined. But the group of people who used anxiety and depression drugs at least once per month had a mortality rate of 15.7 percent.
“These medications aren't candy, and taking them is far from harmless,” explained in a statement Geneviève Belleville.
The expert, a researcher on the new study, is a professor at Université Laval in Québec, MyHealthNewsDaily reports.
She goes on to say that maybe healthcare experts should not be so quick as to prescribe such drugs to patients at the first sign of insomnia, or the first symptoms of anxiety.
“Given that cognitive behavioral therapies have shown good results in treating insomnia and anxiety, doctors should systematically discuss such therapies with their patients as an option,” the expert says.
"Combining a pharmacological approach in the short term with psychological treatment is a promising strategy for reducing anxiety and promoting sleep,” Belleville argues.
Over a 12 year period, she adds, people who take anxiety and depression drugs have a 36 percent higher rate of death than the others.
This is the number that resulted from the investigation after experts accounted for other factors that could have influenced the results, such as alcohol use, smoking and so on.