Psychomike Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 (edited) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26123874 hi all, don't usually post here but read a lot of your stuff. Remember the media hype about benzos causing dementia well here is a WELL DONE STUDY that corrected for the confounding of obvious association and it found NO association with long term benzo use and Alzheimer's. Of course it's being ignored by the media -too - big yawn- boring now we can rest easy knowing we are not destroying our brains with benzos, but of course they still can cause temporary memory lapse while using just like a lot of drugs but not anything beyond that. Edited January 28, 2016 by Psychomike 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melissaw72 Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 Good to know! I've worried about this at times. Thanks for posting! Welcome to CB 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HAL9000 Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 Seriously relieved to hear this. My GDoc was concerned enough to switch me off Valium for Xanax (Which is not so great) because of concerns Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HAL9000 Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 Uhh... I tried reading the link. Can someone "splain" that in english? It sounds like the original study implies that having benzos in the same room cause 100% alzheimers and or dementia and the new study says there is no connection? If correct what kind of craptastic kinds of studies are these? Or is this just another "follow the money" to see that no one is doing any study its all some political hacks trying to make us crazier? SIGH..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melissaw72 Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 2 hours ago, HAL9000 said: Uhh... I tried reading the link. Can someone "splain" that in english? It sounds like the original study implies that having benzos in the same room cause 100% alzheimers and or dementia and the new study says there is no connection? If correct what kind of craptastic kinds of studies are these? Or is this just another "follow the money" to see that no one is doing any study its all some political hacks trying to make us crazier? SIGH..... I just read the conclusion: Quote CONCLUSION: After taking a prodromal phase into consideration, benzodiazepine use was not associated with an increased risk of developing AD or VaD. (AD is Alzheimer's and VaD is vascular dementia). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tryp Posted January 29, 2016 Share Posted January 29, 2016 (edited) Neither study was a randomized controlled trial so neither is the highest quality of evidence for demonstrating causation. In the original study there was an observed correlation between benzodiazepine use and dementia which is not 100% or even necessarily causal. This one looked at the data differently and found something different, probably due to parsing out some potential confounders. I can take a closer look later. Edited January 29, 2016 by tryp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psychomike Posted January 30, 2016 Author Share Posted January 30, 2016 (edited) The gist is this. In the media hype study they simply looked at older adults on benzos and found an association with benzos. The problem with that is as people begin to develop either dementia due to vascular issues or Alzheimer's and usually before full blown problem which lead to a diagnosis they suffer concomitant sleep issues and anxiety, hence the likelihood of being prescribed benzos and z drugs which were also implicated in the media hype study. The researchers in the study I posted already suspected this was the case as have many others speculating on the hyped study. In any case this latest research purposely looked at the very simple question of how long people were on benzos. Those who were on them for 1 year or less had the high association with Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. However, and this is crucial, those who were on benzos for longer than a year had no greater levels of dementia than the general population. Thus it strongly implies that people were having brain changes which relate to these two types of dementia which show up first as insomnia and anxiety and so would be more likely too seek medication. Bottom line is people who take benzos long term were no more likely to develop dementia of either kind. This makes sense because they would be anxious and or insomniac for totally different reasons than having the beginnings of dementia Edited January 30, 2016 by Psychomike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melissaw72 Posted January 30, 2016 Share Posted January 30, 2016 ^^Thanks for the summary ... I wasn't able to figure it out in the study except for in the conclusion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HAL9000 Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 I'm sorry but I'm still not sure I understand it but that might be the Alzheimers induced dementia from use of Benzos and Z drugs. *Trying to be funny... One thing that I do take away from this is if you've been taking Benzos for more then a year continuing to take them beyond that is not going to make anything worse and stopping taking them after a years use won't do anything better. Correct? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melissaw72 Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 ^^I hope so. I've been on benzos since 2000/2001 and have always worried about alzheimers since I started reading about it on-line a few years later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psychomike Posted February 22, 2016 Author Share Posted February 22, 2016 Hi Guys, The study broke down the association problem with the media frenzy study. It looked at people who had been on benzos for longer than a year, many much longer. And compared these to people who just started them recently. This led to the result that older folks simply start taking them because of early dementia symptoms which is VERY common. This is known as a confounder in research and it causes all kinds of sloppy results when studies just look at groups of people on benzos and see an association with Alzheimer's. The problem is replete in studies like that because they don't discriminate people who take the drugs for conditions totally unrelated to Alzheimer's like anxiety disorders. When they lump them all together you end up showing strong associations. It never means cause and effect.nand this study wanted to clear this up. The evidence from this study is much better than the media frenzy study. It it shows no association with Alzheimer's in people who were on the benzos for more than a year or longer, but found a very strong association for those on them for less than a year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HAL9000 Posted February 29, 2016 Share Posted February 29, 2016 I'm glad this is till being talked about. Had a talk with my GP about some receint issues and I actually asked her if it was ok to take two Xanax at a time instead of one. *Those insurance issues are driving me straight out of my mind. This reminds me of the (my opinion) flawed study that connected heart problems with female Hormone Replacement therapy. The gist of the study was that they used only synthetic estrogen and the women they used in the study had a huge age difference. Which to my thinking is you take a woman 20 years after menopause and jack her up on high doses of synthetic estrogen and bad things happen... No shit! Really? Do you think? I think a more sensable study would be to do the same study and put 1/3 of the women on synthetics, 1/3 on Human (Identical) estrogen and 1/3rd without anything. And use women who have only receintly been in menopause. If you want to do a study with women 10 or 20+ years out of menopause do that as a seperate study. This maybe a bit of paranoid thinking but has anyone felt that every "new" study shows the same thing? Its suddenly a bad idea to treat anything? As in... This costs the insurance companies money. If we tell people with Cancer to ponder "watchful waiting" we don't have to pay for expensive surgery or chemo until it gets bad enough that we won't have to pay because it will be pointless? Then exchange "Cancer" with any drug or doctor or therapy and get the same result. And on the other side of the coin when was the last time a drug maker or doctor, university came up with a one time "cure" like the Polio Vaccine? Not a daily $$$tablet or Pill$$$. *And yes, I understand it doesn't make money to make up a one time pill or treatment but should our health be an "industry" based on making gobs of money and employing people to come up with slightly different variations on the same drug so that it can be repatented to increase margins? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psychomike Posted March 13, 2016 Author Share Posted March 13, 2016 (edited) And yet another study showing benzos do not cause Demetria or alzheimers http://www.empr.com/news/does-benzodiazepine-use-up-risk-of-dementia-alzheimers/article/470826/ No association found between dementia and highest-level exposure to benzodiazepines Edited March 13, 2016 by Psychomike 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melissaw72 Posted March 13, 2016 Share Posted March 13, 2016 In this link (connected to the link above): http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i90 Quote Conclusion The risk of dementia is slightly higher in people with minimal exposure to benzodiazepines but not with the highest level of exposure. These results do not support a causal association between benzodiazepine use and dementia. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psychomike Posted March 13, 2016 Author Share Posted March 13, 2016 (edited) Hi Mellisaw, one was done in the Uk and the other was done in State of Washington. They are two distinct studies. Edited March 13, 2016 by Psychomike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melissaw72 Posted March 14, 2016 Share Posted March 14, 2016 Oh, ok. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HAL9000 Posted April 11, 2016 Share Posted April 11, 2016 Let me guess. The UK with national Health Care is the one with the negative study? They seem to be finding a lot of reasons to avoid spending any time or effort on treating problems. Like the "You have prostate cancer? Just wait and see if it get worse." You get what you paid for with "Free" healthcare. Lets ration who we spend money fixing and lets alway error on the side of do no harm / do nothing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psychomike Posted April 12, 2016 Author Share Posted April 12, 2016 On March 14, 2016 at 9:34 PM, melissaw72 said: Oh, ok. confounding? Yes here is yet another example from another country showing very clearly why poorly done research makes benzos look bad. Neutel CI1, Johansen HL. Author information Abstract PURPOSE: Many research studies have found associations between benzodiazepines and/or z-hypnotics (BZZ) and increasing mortality, leading to a discussion about causation or confounding. This study suggests a factor that could produce this association through confounding. METHODS: The Norwegian population in 2010 supplied 8862 deaths ages 41-80 and 898,289 controls. Index dates were added to control records which corresponded to death dates. BZZ use was recorded for 2 years before death/index date. RESULTS: Persons exposed to BZZ were more likely (OR = 2.3) to die than those who were not. With proximity of death, increasingly larger proportions of the prospective deaths received prescriptions for BZZ, until in the last 2 months 40-45% received BZZ. The frequency of BZZ use in controls increased with age as opposed to the death cohort where all ages showed similar rates of BZZ use. In the last few months before death, the youngest age group had an OR = 5.8 for BZZ use while the oldest age group an OR = 1.8, adjusted for age and sex. Opioid use showed a similar pattern of increasing use near death. CONCLUSIONS: The increased use of BZZ with approaching death is consistent with increasing symptomatic treatment in terminal illness. Thus, the association of BZZ and mortality is more likely to be due to confounding than to causality. Further evidence from this and other research includes similar use patterns for other drugs such as opioids, the lack of specificity in cause of death and the size of the association regarding age and time to death Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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