Medications cause sleep problems.

Older people who have difficulty falling asleep at night may need to look at the labels of any non-prescription medications they are taking, suggests Robert B. Wallace, professor of preventive medicine and environmental health, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City. "Physicians and pharmacists should warn elderly patients with sleeping problems that caffeinated medications might make trying to sleep at night even worse. It's a very big problem because there are a lot of older people with sleeping problems, and older people use a lot of over-the-counter medications.

"Combination painkillers have been around for at least 50 years. Some people felt that adding caffeine to aspirin would help enhance over-the-counter medications. But the extra pain relief you get is probably not very important. Today, there are many forms of pain medicine available to people, so while combination painkillers still...