What Is Psychopharmacology?

Take our Do I Need Therapy?

Find a therapist near me

An AHA abstract linked long-term recorded melatonin use to a higher heart failure risk.

The observational design cannot establish that melatonin caused the increased risk.

Insomnia itself can affect cardiovascular health and complicate the findings.

Randomized trials have reported some encouraging cardiovascular effects of melatonin.

Melatonin is widely used as a sleep aid, with its regulatory status varying between countries. That made a conference abstract presented at the American Heart Association’s 2025 Scientific Sessions particularly alarming. The researchers reported that adults with insomnia whose medical records indicated at least a year of melatonin use had an 89 percent higher hazard of developing heart failure over the following five years.

The abstract analyzed 130,828 adults with insomnia using electronic health records from the TriNetX Global Research Network. Half had at least 365 days of recorded melatonin exposure, while the other half had no melatonin exposure recorded. Heart failure occurred in 4.6 percent of the melatonin group compared with 2.7 percent of the comparison group. The researchers also reported higher rates of heart failure hospitalization and death from any cause among people with recorded melatonin use.

The numbers are striking, but because the analysis was observational, they cannot establish that melatonin caused the higher rate of heart failure. The findings also raise questions about how accurately the recorded exposure reflects actual melatonin use and whether the two groups differed in ways that the researchers could not account for.

What the abstract could not tell us

The researchers matched the two groups across numerous characteristics, including medical........

© Psychology Today