Suvorexant, sold under the trade name Belsomra, is a medication for the treatment of insomnia.
In a new study, researchers found suvorexant improves total sleep time in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and insomnia.
The research was conducted by a team from Merck & Co., in Kenilworth and elsewhere.
In the study, the team focused on patients with mild‐to‐moderate Alzheimer’s disease being cared for at home whose sleep disturbance met diagnostic criteria for insomnia.
They assigned patients with both probable Alzheimer’s disease and insomnia to four weeks of suvorexant 10 mg (136 patients; could be increased to 20 mg based on clinical response) or placebo (141 patients).
Overnight polysomnography in a sleep laboratory was used to assess total sleep time.
The researchers found that at week 4, the total sleep time increased about 73 minutes for the suvorexant group and 45 minutes for the placebo group.
Patients taking suvorexant were twice as likely to show an improvement of ≥60 minutes in total sleep time compared with those taking placebo.
In suvorexant-treated patients, a state of a strong desire for sleep was reported by 4.2% of participants versus 1.4% of placebo-treated patients.
The team says suvorexant did not appear to impair next-day cognitive or psychomotor performance as assessed by objective tests.
One author of the study is W. Joseph Herring, M.D., Ph.D.
The study is published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
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