Restless legs syndrome (RLS) is a sensorimotor neu-rologic and movement disorder that seriously impacts sleep and quality of life. The patient experiences char-acteristic complaints of unpleasant sensations in the legs with an urge to move while lying down in bed at night trying to get to sleep; these sensations are relieved by movement, at least temporarily.
RLS is thought to be the most common neurological movement disorder most uncommonly diagnosed. Indeed, this condition is often misdiagnosed and misunderstood. Many times in the past, patients with RLS were labeled as “psy-choneurotics.”
More recently, there has been significant awareness of the condition in contemporary medicine, although some people continue to mislabel RLS as a “disease-mongering” condition. These skeptics really should take the time to ask persons with RLS (those suffering from moderately severe to severe disease) what the condition is like. To these individuals, RLS is a torture. Some have even stated, “I would rather die than live with this dreaded disease.”
Recent studies have clearly shown that RLS is a real disease with a biological basis and that it is familial, is associated with many other disorders, and can be treated effectively if diagnosed correctly and differentiated from other con-ditions mimicking RLS.
The name “restless legs syndrome” itself does not evoke the true seriousness of this condition. Often the disease is not taken seriously because the patient does not necessarily look sick and generally remains symp-tom free in the daytime.
One of the problems in defin-ing RLS is that there is no single laboratory test that can definitively prove the presence of the disease; instead, the diagnosis depends entirely on patients’ symptoms and physicians’ critical evaluation of these symptoms. Many patients do not seek advice of the physicians because they are apprehensive that their symptoms will not be taken seriously and that they will be labeled as psychoneurotics.
RLS is a very common disease that may affect as much as 10% of the population; the most severe disease requiring physician intervention may affect 2.7% of the population.
RLS is associated with signifi-cant morbidity (illness of health) that affects the per-son’s quality of life, interferes with social and personal relationships, and makes day-to-day functioning difficult (and the affected person miserable). Sleep dysfunction is a major complaint of affected patients; this problem may coexist with anxiety, depression, obesity, heart failure, excessive daytime sleepiness, and impairment of cogni-tion, concentration, affect, and attention.