Case study: Melatonin

gwern

I discuss melatonin's effects on sleep & its safety; I segue into the general benefits of sleep and the severely disrupted sleep of the modern Western world, the cost of melatonin use and the benefit (eg. enforcing regular bedtimes), followed by a basic cost-benefit analysis of melatonin concluding that the net profit is large enough to be worth giving it a try barring unusual conditions or very pessimistic safety estimates.

Full essay: http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin

I discuss melatonin's effects on sleep & its safety; I segue into the general benefits of sleep and the severely disrupted sleep of the modern Western world, the cost of melatonin use and the benefit (eg. enforcing regular bedtimes), followed by a basic cost-benefit analysis of melatonin concluding that the net profit is large enough to be worth giving it a try barring unusual conditions or very pessimistic safety estimates.

Full essay: http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin

It sounds interesting but I'm a little wary of your one line dismissal of any potential side effects without reference. To the best of my knowledge the function of sleep is still not completely understood and the long term effects of reduced sleep are not known. A suggestion to take any kind of supplement every day for the rest of your life places a fairly high bar on safety. Taking melatonin to overcome jet-lag seems very likely to be safe but I'm more wary of using it on an ongoing daily basis.

Do you have any references to support the claim that there are no long term side effects of daily use?

I did link to Wikipedia for a reason; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin#Availability_and_safety . But besides AngryParsley's link, there's

Given the unanimous results of safety in the short-term, positive results in long-term child use, the exploitation of a regular physiological process, the long track-record of melatonin use, a... (read more)

3AngryParsley16y

Here's the longest-term study I could find: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19486273 Basically, children taking melatonin for several years didn't develop any problems. Melatonin is also used by blind people quite a bit, since without it their circadian rhythms are longer than 24 hours.

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Case study: Melatonin

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Case study: Melatonin

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