Zolpidem
chemical compound
Zolpidem, sold under the brand name Ambien among others, is a medication primarily used for the short-term treatment of sleeping problems. Guidelines recommend that it be used only after cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and after behavioral changes, such as sleep hygiene, have been tried. It decreases the time to sleep onset by about fifteen minutes and at larger doses helps people stay asleep longer. It is taken by mouth and is available as conventional tablets, extended-release tablets, or sublingual tablets.
Common side effects include daytime sleepiness, headache, nausea, and diarrhea. More severe side effects include memory problems and hallucinations. While flumazenil, a GABAA receptor antagonist, can reverse zolpidem's effects, usually supportive care is all that is recommended in overdose.
Zolpidem is a nonbenzodiazepine, or Z-drug, which acts as a sedative and hypnotic as a positive allosteric modulator at the GABAA receptor. It is an imidazopyridine and increases GABA effects in the central nervous system by binding to GABAA receptors at the same location as benzodiazepines. It generally has a half-life of two to three hours.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zolpidem” 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.