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- Title
Cognitive effects of long-term benzodiazepine use in older adults.
- Authors
McAndrews, Mary Pat; Weiss, Rachel T.; Sandor, Paul; Taylor, Ann; Carlen, Peter L.; Shapiro, Colin M.
- Abstract
This study examined the potential for cognitive morbidity associated with the long-term use of benzodiazepine (BZ) sedative-hypnotics in a sample of healthy older adults. Tests of memory, attention and processing speed were conducted prior to and 1 month after drug discontinuation for 25 BZ-users and at similar intervals for 26 healthy control subjects. After controlling for differences in affective status between BZ-users and controls, there were no significant group differences in cognitive performance. However, BZ-users showed greater gains on tests of attention and speed of processing at repeat testing compared with controls this improvement was not attributable to a change in affective status. These findings suggest that there may be subtle and reversible effects of long-term BZ use on speed-dependent tasks in older adults. However, the magnitude of these effects is quite small and may be of little clinical significance in the healthy elderly. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
- Subjects
BENZODIAZEPINES; COGNITION in old age; MOTOR ability testing; HYPNOTICS; SLEEP; MEMORY in old age
- Publication
Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical & Experimental, 2003, Vol 18, Issue 1, p51
- ISSN
0885-6222
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/hup.453