PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A common sleep aid can do a lot more than give you a good night’s rest.
Researchers at the Rutgers University Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy found that melatonin significantly reduces kidney failure among patients taking the antibiotic vancomycin.
Patients can contract infections while hospitalized, like MRSA, a staph infection that’s difficult to treat. Associate professor Dr. Luigi Brunetti said vancomycin is often used.
“The tricky thing with vancomycin is there’s also evidence out there that it causes what we call oxidative stress on cells in the body — in particular, those cells in the kidney,” Brunetti explained. “They get stressed to the point where some of those cells die and you have what we call kidney dysfunction, and that leads to the drug building up in your body.”
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Antibiotic use is one of the leading causes of drug-induced kidney failure worldwide, according to Rutgers, with more than 13.3 million cases each year.
The search was on for a way to protect the kidneys, and researchers looked at melatonin.
“We use melatonin quite a bit in the hospital, and we often use it as a sleeping aid instead of using some of the other, we’ll call them stronger sleep aids,” he said. “So what if we look back in the data that we have in the hospitalized patient, and we’re able to see whether there was an association with melatonin use and better outcomes in terms of kidneys?”
Researchers found that patients taking melatonin and vancomycin had a 63% decrease in acute kidney injury. Brunetti said that correlation is promising but needs further study.