[HN Gopher] Long-term use of melatonin to support sleep may have...
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       Long-term use of melatonin to support sleep may have negative
       health effects
        
       Author : incomplete
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2025-11-05 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (newsroom.heart.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.heart.org)
        
       | NoPicklez wrote:
       | Interesting and importantly both groups were those who had
       | insomnia and those who had previously been diagnosed with heart
       | failure were excluded.
        
       | xhrpost wrote:
       | I don't have access to the actual study but I wonder if they had
       | access to any metrics for the individuals that could quantify the
       | intensity of the insomnia. Chronic insomnia/sleep deprivation is
       | already correlated with heart disease. Could it be that the
       | people with worse insomnia were more likely to take melatonin but
       | also more likely to have heart issues due to the insomnia alone?
        
       | tech_ken wrote:
       | > "Worse insomnia, depression/anxiety or the use of other sleep-
       | enhancing medicines might be linked to both melatonin use and
       | heart risk," Nnadi said. "Also, while the association we found
       | raises safety concerns about the widely used supplement, our
       | study cannot prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship. This
       | means more research is needed to test melatonin's safety for the
       | heart."
       | 
       | This seems pretty critical, no? I would assume that melatonin use
       | increases with the severity of insomnia, and persistent lack of
       | sleep has a whole host of long-term health implications. So
       | insomnia a priori seems highly likely to cause both increased
       | melatonin consumption and heart disease. Given how obviously
       | confounded this causal system is, it's practically negligent to
       | not at least control for severity of insomnia or something.
       | Ideally they should have done a matched study or DID or
       | something, but without any attempt to account for the confounding
       | this study is just clickbait.
        
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       (page generated 2025-11-05 23:01 UTC)