Insomnia is a sleep disorder characterized by a difficulty in falling asleep, which can be more or less marked, and by a lack of sleep, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The causes of insomnia can be many, including stressful situations, the intake of certain types of drugs, the presence of psychiatric disorders or other pathologies, etc.
The use of sleeping pills for the treatment of insomnia is necessary when this disorder becomes invalidating for the patient; in fact, the chronic lack of rest is able to have negative effects also on the daytime life of the individual.
The main classes of sleeping pills used in therapy will be briefly illustrated below. However, before continuing, a clarification is necessary: currently, the term "sleeping pills" is not widely used, as it is preferred to define these drugs more specifically as "sedative-hypnotic".
they were among the first drugs to be used to combat sleep disorders.
In addition to being used as sleeping pills, barbiturates are also endowed with anxiolytic, anticonvulsant and anesthetic activities.
In truth, today, barbiturates are considered rather obsolete active ingredients for the treatment of insomnia; for this reason, their use as sleeping pills has now ceased, in favor of other safer drugs. In fact, these drugs have a rather narrow therapeutic index and are also endowed with a certain toxicity.
Their use is mostly limited to the anesthetic field (such as, for example, in the case of thiopental, which is considered an intravenous general anesthetic) and to the treatment of convulsive disorders (as in the case of phenobarbital, which is used as an anticonvulsant in therapy of epilepsy).
