The value of insomnia market in the world is likely to reach £3.5 billion by 2019, driven by uptake of treatments currently in development, according to estimates by Datamonitor.

Though over 33 million individuals across the world meet the diagnostic criteria for insomnia, a sizeable proportion of patients do not seek medical advice and doctors aren't suitably prepared to identify and address the problem, suggests an independent market analyst of Datamonitor, a provider of premium global business information which assists more than 6,000 of the world's leading companies in making strategic and operational decisions.

Charlotte Mackey, senior healthcare analyst at Datamonitor, said, "Key opinion leaders interviewed by Datamonitor expressed a strong belief that despite the high prevalence of insomnia, improvement in recognition, diagnosis and treatment is required."

"The key issue is that a sizeable proportion of patients do not seek medical advice about sleeping problems, with the majority either ignoring the problem or using self-help methods such as alcohol, natural remedies or over-the-counter (OTC) products."

For example, a UK-based study of primary insomnia patient found that for 56 per cent, the most commonly cited reason for not seeking treatment was the perception of insomnia as benign, trivial or a problem than one should be able to cope with alone. Similarly, according to the National Sleep Foundation's 2005 'Sleep in America' poll, some 45 per cent of responders reported that they would talk to a doctor if they thought they had a sleep problem, while 18 per cent said they would assume the problem would go away or that they would do nothing about it .

"Physician-related factors also pose important barriers to the recognition and treatment of insomnia," Mackey says. "Physicians may avoid discussing problems such as sleep difficulties due to the time constraints of GP office visits and the perception that treatment of insomnia centers upon pharmacological substances that are associated with risks. Moreover, key opinion leaders maintain that the limited time dedicated to sleep medicine in medical training leads to diagnostic and treatment hurdles in insomnia."

Insomnia is defined as a subjective perception of dissatisfaction with the amount and/or quality of sleep and may include symptoms of: difficulty initiating sleep, difficulty maintaining sleep, difficulty returning to sleep after waking too early and non-restorative or poor quality sleep. Insomnia also involves daytime consequences such as fatigue, lack of energy, difficulty concentrating and irritability.