Melatonin and heart failure?!!

[Justdontknowhow]

I’ve read several news reports in the last day or so about this! I am not putting up links but you can google it . I find this so concerning, it’s been around years and I assumed it was safe , anyone more knowledgeable than me around and know more?

It’s not the melatonin per se- it’s just recognised that long term insomnia can lead to cardiac issues

What I read is that a correlation has been found not necessarily causation, people with heart and related issues are likely to have issues with sleep (eg sleep apnea) and thus more likely to take melatonin. So it’s not that melatonin is more likely to cause it, but that people taking melatonin are already higher risk.

Thank you , thanks reassuring. My niece who has autism been using it for years not all all the time but quite regularly and these headlines have been worrying. It actually said an almost 90 percent increased risk of heart failure . I find that staggering.

Worth remembering that poor sleep is itself associated with poor health outcomes- raised risk of cancer particularly in shift workers, raised rates of obesity and cardiac issues as others have said.

Could be an association only. Until control for confounding vateiables is applied then it doesn’t mean much at all.

Also, a 90% increase sounds terrifying but what it means is that if you have, say, a 0.5% chance of developing heart failure in a year, your chances of developing it have risen to 0.95%-in other words the chances are still really really tiny, less than 1%. Of course, it’s much worse for someone who is already at a very high risk (no medication is entirely safe, after all) but those people know that they are unwell. For everyone else the risk is negligible.