Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Sleep aid melatonin is shipped in pills containing ridiculous amounts of the stuff—I’ve seen 10, 12, and 20mg myself, Amazon has a 40mg fast dissolve and 60mg gummies.
This spikes your blood amount with 100x-1000x of your natural cycle of melatonin. Why? Because melatonin is not, repeat not, the signaling molecule that makes you sleepy. It responds to light levels and triggers the cascade of other molecules that make you sleepy, several hours after it peaks. So that's why the 100x overdose—you are trying to kick those secondary mechanisms into overdrive, “hey everyone it is black as the abyss of hell I guess we gotta sleep!!”, because Americans taking melatonin want to pop one just before bed and have it knock them out.
And it does that for like 2 or 3 days before your body starts down-regulating all of its sensitivities to those melatonin byproducts. Nerve cells like to be tickled, not zapped, when you shock them like this they react angrily.
You want to use melatonin to reinforce circadian rhythm and fight jet lag, you do it with amounts in the ~100 micrograms range, slow release if you can find it, and you take that at sunset and let it reinforce your normal cycle. If you're looking for an acute sleep aid, take a walk, get fresh air, drink water, and if those don't help pop a Benadryl/Unisom (it's the same drug either way). If you have doctor’s orders of course follow those, but if you're just trying to self-medicate that’s how you do it.
Absolutely unsurprising that punching your sleep apparatus in the gut once every day for five years increases some sort of stress on your heart.
The other useful thing I learned is that melatonin isn't primarily involved in falling asleep, its main function as a hormone is in staying asleep. I've started taking it sporadically if I wake up in the middle of the night, to make sure I get back to a deep sleep and stay there, and it seems to be super effective for this.
Are you sure about this? Everything I can find says Benadryl is diphenhydramine, and Unisom is doxylamine. (Both linked to increased dementia risk, for what it's worth.)
These TriNetX studies are usually garbage because they’re entirely dependent on how accurate/up-to-date the medical record is.
The comparison between the US and UK probably leads to two issues - US users use way too much melatonin and swamp heart disease signal, while UK patients prescribed melatonin probably have significant sleep derangement (consider how much effort it takes to get prescribed something for sleep - you need to schedule an appointment, convince your doctor, go to the pharmacy, etc)
pogue•2h ago