New numbers from Medco Health show that the use of sleeping pills by adolescents grew by 85 percent since 2000. About 180,000 children and young adults between the ages of 10 and 20 took sleeping medications, even though no one under the age of 18 has been included in any of the clinical trials for the drugs. While those numbers still represent only one-in-500 adolescents, some physicians are worried that the spike could in part be due to physicians prescribing the drugs unnecessarily.
- read this article from The New York Times for more