NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - One reason that alcoholics may find it hard to quit drinking is that alcohol can help them fall asleep, and giving it up may disrupt their sleep for many months, according to preliminary study findings reported this week.

In the future, until their brains can adjust to the lack of alcohol, quitters may be able to take medicine that helps them sleep, study author Dr. Dwayne Godwin told Reuters Health.

However, Godwin cautioned that medications that target the sleep changes in alcoholics do not yet exist, and it is not completely clear if other sleep agents are safe for recovering alcoholics.

Godwin added that researchers know that alcohol causes two phases of sleep changes in heavy drinkers. Initially, it acts as a sedative, helping them fall asleep faster and sleep deeper in the first part of the night, he said.

However, during the second half of the night, people who have had a lot to drink hours before often become restless, waking up often and struggling to fall back asleep, Godwin noted.

So alcoholics who miss alcohol's ability to help them fall asleep are only "going after the first part" of what alcohol does, he said. "It's like a cat chasing its tail."

Indeed, reports from recovering alcoholics show that these sleep problems can last up to months or years, said Godwin, a researcher at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina.

He and his colleagues presented their findings Wednesday during the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.

In their study, Godwin and his colleagues tested the effect of large quantities of alcohol on the brains of non-human primates. The researchers found that proteins in primates' brains that help control when they fall asleep, and progress through the normal stages of sleep, appear to be "dysregulated" in heavy drinkers, Godwin said.

Consequently, people who have been drinking habitually for many years may find that, when they decide to give it up, they have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, and experiencing normal stages of sleep, without which they may wake feeling less rested, Godwin noted.

He explained that the brain becomes used to overcompensating for the chronic stress of alcohol. Suddenly removing the alcohol is very jarring, Godwin said, and it makes sense that it would take time to recover.

"This is a long-term change in the biology of the brain," he said.

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