Effective and tolerable - these are the best sleeping pills

Many sufferers and doctors use medication to treat insomnia. An international research team led by Andrea Cipriani from Oxford University has therefore devoted itself to the question of which sleep-inducing agents can really be recommended from a scientific point of view. To do this, the 17 researchers evaluated 154 controlled clinical studies in which a total of 30 active ingredients were examined in more than 44,000 sleep-disordered patients.

A massive pool of data – albeit with the caveat that only five studies have tracked the effectiveness and only eight the safety of the drugs over a period of three months or longer. Which, given that sleep disorders tend to be chronic, is already a deficit. Nevertheless, the researchers were able to set up a kind of list of the best in common sleeping pills.