Nitrazepam
benzodiazepine sedative
Nitrazepam, sold under the brand name Mogadon among others, is a hypnotic drug of the benzodiazepine class used for short-term relief from severe, disabling anxiety and insomnia. It also has sedative (calming) properties, as well as amnestic (inducing forgetfulness), anticonvulsant, and skeletal muscle relaxant effects.
It was first synthesized in the late 1950s by a team of researchers at Hoffmann-La Roche in Switzerland. It was patented in 1961 and came into medical use in 1965.
Medical use
Nitrazepam is used to treat short-term sleeping problems (insomnia), namely difficulty falling asleep, frequent awakening, early awakening, or a combination of each.
Nitrazepam is sometimes tried to treat epilepsy when other medications fail. It has been found to be more effective than clonazepam in the treatment of West syndrome, which is an age-dependent epilepsy, affecting the very young. In uncontrolled studies, nitrazepam has shown effectiveness in infantile spasms and is sometimes considered when other anti-seizure drugs have failed. However, drowsiness, hypotonia, and most significantly tolerance to anti-seizure effects typically develop with long-term treatment, generally limiting Nitrazepam to acute seizure management. Nitrazepam can also mitigate effects of alcohol withdrawal.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Nitrazepam” as benzodiazepine sedative. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q410078. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1961 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nitrazepam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.