The use of sleeping pills among children and very young adults rose 85 percent from 2000 to 2004, in yet another sign that parents and doctors are increasingly turning to prescription medications to solve childhood health and behavioral problems.
And about 15 percent of people under age 20 who received sleeping pills were also being given drugs to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, according to the study by Medco Health Solutions, a managed-care company that makes estimates about medication use in the whole population based on extrapolations from its own data. Drugs used to treat attention disorders can cause insomnia.
Few of the prescriptions given to children and young adults have the approval of the Food and Drug Administration because no sleep medication has been approved for use in children under 18. Still, doctors commonly use medications for patients and disorders for which the drugs have never received formal approval, particularly when those patients are children.
Courtesy of The NY Times
Steve - Reflux Meds, Attention Deficit Drugs, Sleep Medications, and others? This is yet another indictment of parents and their physicians who throw band-aid apporaches to problems that can often be remedied by getting to the cause, diet. Now we are prescribing meds to mask the symptoms created by other meds in children! It is unfathomable to us that the FDA allows these medications to continually be prescribed to children when they have not been researched. Have we not learned anything from depression medications that led to suicides in children and teens? For more info, go to nutritionalconcepts.com to read our piece on the misuse of reflux meds in babies.
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