Why Does Ambien Make People Act Weirdly? A Mice Study Explains

Or should I say tries to explain, since animal studies are usually fairly tentative in their findings and applicability to humans? That said, researchers have been using a mouse model to examine why some people who take Ambien, the well-known sleeping drug, do things like sleepwalking, sleep-driving and other odd-to-them behaviors, often with no memory of the event.

From Reuters:

"Ambien, made by Sanofi-Aventis, can shut down powerful brain circuits responsible for inhibiting brain activity under certain circumstances, leaving other brain circuits unchecked, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington said.

"'You are kind of releasing the brakes,' said Molly Huntsman of Georgetown, who worked on the study that appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This may stimulate brain circuits that would normally be silenced. 'In a way, Ambien is awakening other circuits because the brakes are not in place,' Huntsman said.

"To study the effects of the drug, known generically as zolpidem, Huntsman and colleagues conducted a series of experiments in mice.

"The team wanted to see how mice on the drug would respond when the researchers trimmed their whiskers, which rodents use as their primary sensory system -- much like humans rely on vision to take in information about the world.

"The team found that mice that were deprived of this sensory information had changes in their brain that affected the way they responded to the drug Ambien.

"'It's a population of neurons that is normally in place to stop activity. We find what Ambien does is inhibit their function to inhibit,' Huntsman said in a telephone interview."

I wasn't able to pull up the paper from PNAS, but that Ambien may be blocking inhibitions in humans sure would explain a lot of the weirdness that's cropped up around the use of the drug such as this recent tale of a man cheating on his wife one night while on the drug or this sad story from earlier this year wherein a man sleepwalked on a bitterly cold night and died.

It would be interesting to see this mice research replicated in humans.