Heavy use of benzodiazepines linked to Alzheimer's onset in older people
Findings add to suspicion prolonged or intensive use of benzodiazepines such as Xanax or Mogadon causes the onset of mind-robbing disease
Older people who have relied on a class of drugs called benzodiazepines to reduce anxiety or induce sleep are at higher risk of going on to develop Alzheimer's disease, new research finds.
Benzodiazepines - marketed under such names as Xanax, Valium, Ativan and Klonopin - are widely used to treat insomnia, agitation and anxiety, all of which can be early signs of impending Alzheimer's disease in the elderly. But the current study sought to disentangle benzodiazepines' use in treating early dementia symptoms, probing instead the possibility that heavy use of the medications may permit, cause or hasten the onset of Alzheimer's dementia.
The study compared the pattern of benzodiazepine use in 1,796 elderly people diagnosed with Alzheimer's with that of 7,184 similar people who had no such diagnosis. Such a study design, conducted by French and Canadian researchers and published this week in the journal BMJ, cannot by itself establish that more intensive use of the medications causes Alzheimer's disease. But it does strengthen such suspicions.
Among the study participants over 66 who were living independently in the Canadian province of Quebec, those who took low-dose benzodiazepine medication, or who took higher doses but very briefly or infrequently, did not see their Alzheimer's risk go up five years after they were first prescribed such a medication. But the picture was more worrisome for those who frequently took long-acting benzodiazepines, who frequently took high doses, or who took any such drugs regularly over several months.
The benzodiazepines specifically considered by the researchers were the short-acting anti-anxiety medications alprazolam (Xanax), lorazepam (Ativan), oxazepam (Seresta) and diazepam (Valium), and the longer-acting anti-seizure and "hypnotic" drugs frequently used to treat insomnia: clonazepam (Klonopin), flurazepam (Dalmane), midazolam (Versed), nitrazepam (Mogadon), temazepam (Restoril) and triazolam (Halcion).