More Research Needed on Melatonin

LONDON (Reuters) - Melatonin is widely used to relieve the effects of jet lag but better safety standards and more research on it is needed, scientists said on Thursday.

Millions of people already take melatonin, which is sold in pharmacies and health food stores in the United States, Thailand, Singapore and on the Internet, but only a handful of studies have been done on it.

"We know that it works. We would like to know more about what doses to use for different groups of people," said Andrew Herxheimer of the Cochrane Center, which publishes reviews on healthcare treatments.

"We need safety data. We need to find out what happens with anticoagulants (blood thinners), blood coagulation and brain rhythms, especially in people with epilepsy," he added in an interview.

Side effects from melatonin are very rare but Herxheimer said people taking blood-thinning drugs or those who suffer from epilepsy should avoid melatonin until more is known about it.

Melatonin is a hormone that is produced by the pineal gland in the brain when the body is exposed to light.

Herxheimer said there is no financial incentive for drug companies to conduct research into melatonin so he and Jim Waterhouse, of John Moores University in Liverpool, England, are calling for public funding because governments, the armed forces and the public could benefit from using it for jet lag.

"If the use of the drug is in the public interest, then public funds should be used to get it properly tested and licensed," they said in a report in the British Medical Journal.

Jet lag results when various body rhythms, such as sleep and activity, and environmental rhythms are out of step due to flying across times zones. It usually takes a few days for the body clock to shift to the new time zone. Melatonin eases the transition and relieves jet lag.

Herxheimer is also concerned that there are no official standards of purity for melatonin.

"Four of six melatonin products bought in health food shops in the United States were found to contain unidentified impurities," he said in the journal report.

To minimize the effects of jet lag, he advised people traveling westward to stay awake during daylight at their destination and to sleep when it gets dark.

People going in the opposite direction should avoid bright light in the morning and be outdoors as much as possible in the afternoon.

Reference Source 89

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