Sleep Synthesis Essay

Seven hours ago, the sun set. It is currently 1:30 AM, and you’re still tossing in bed: awake, alert, and annoyed. Does that sound familiar? Or perhaps this strikes a louder bell: You had drifted off quickly, sinking into a slumber that should have provided your body with the precious rest it deserves, but upon awakening, your alarm has not yet gone off yet, and the clock says 2 o’clock AM. And from then on, its familiar digits slowly inched toward morning as you watched. Sleep had abandoned you. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that “an estimated 50–70 million adults in the United States have chronic sleep and wakefulness disorders" ("Unhealthy Sleep-Related Behaviors"). This was approximately 20% of the population. So what is causing all this trouble? The Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research says it could be your circadian rhythm, which “acts as an internal clock guiding such things as your sleep-wake cycle” ("Insomnia"). Your circadian rhythm is regulated by a neurohormone called melatonin, which as Johns Hopkins sleep expert Luis F. Buenaver, Ph.D., C.B.S.M. explains, “As melatonin levels rise in the evening, it puts you into a state of quiet wakefulness that promotes sleep” (qtd. in “Melatonin for Sleep”).

Melatonin is a potent hormone that is also taken as an over-the-counter dietary supplement by many people despite a lack of regulation and lack of research on its long term effects, so it is important to support more research about melatonin and raise awareness about melatonin among the general public.
With the lack of long-term research and lack of information for the public, melatonin can be dangerous—especially since it’s sold over the counter in the US. Because melatonin is sold in the US as a dietary supplement since it is found in some foods, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not allowed to regulate it as a drug. As it is written in bold on the FDA website, “FDA is not authorized to review dietary supplement products for safety and effectiveness before they are marketed (FDA).” Thus, the long-term effects of taking the melatonin are unknown. On top of that, because of the lack of regulation, there is no official dosage recommendation, so the hormone is sold in typical doses of 0.1 to 10 mg (“Melatonin,” UXL). This can elevate your blood melatonin levels to 50 to 100 times the normal level (Michaels) and can also “have the opposite effect of its intended purpose” by disrupting your circadian rhythms and “leave you feeling groggy and sleepy during the day and give you nightmares or extremely vivid dreams at night (“Melatonin Overdose”).”
Furthermore, even though melatonin is labelled as a dietary supplement, it is still also a neurohormone produced by your body to be used by your body, and without awareness of what taking more can do, you can hurt yourself. There are two types of melatonin supplements being sold on the market, synthetic (human-made) and natural (from animals). Natural melatonin can contain diseases.

Melatonin is best for jet lag anyway, although there may be other ways it can help
Of course, melatonin has always been an integral part of our lives, and we’ve been using melatonin as a supplement for more than three decades now. 3 million adults took melatonin in 2012 (CDC). It is a risk to invest in melatonin research since researching pharmacodynamics, the study of the effects drugs cause, is expensive in both money and various other resources. However, from a moral vantage point, the ethical cost of human lives outweighs the financial cost of research; even if it costs millions, it may still be more valuable to take steps to prevent accidents. Between 2007 to 2012, the number of adults taking melatonin had more than doubled, and the number of children taking it increasing by 482 percent. Sales for the hormone also grew, increasing 20 percent annually for the next three years, according to the Nutrition Business Journal (qtd. in Michaels). The supplement may have been around for some length of time, but that does not decrease the potential of accidents; rather, it increases—there is no research about the long-term effects of the hormone yet.