Restless legs syndrome

From WikiCover

While RLS symptoms can vary from person to person, they are generally described as burning, crawling, tingling, or tugging sensations in the legs. Restless legs syndrome remains a common, yet often undiagnosed, neurological sensorimotor disorder.

Announced July 18, 2007, Boehringer Ingelheim launched an initiative to educate about the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of RLS including a major direct-to-consumer advertising campaign.

On July 18, 2007, The Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation announced the discovery of the first gene variant that contributes substantially to risk for restless legs syndrome (RLS). This study was supported in part by a grant from the RLS Foundation and was conducted by physician researcher and RLS Foundation Board member David Rye, M.D., Ph.D. and his collaborators at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland. The results of this study appear in the online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The researchers discovered a gene variant that appears to be the primary contributor to RLS. The variant is extremely common -- nearly 65 percent of the population of Iceland and the southeastern U.S. carry at least one copy of the variant -- helping to explain why RLS is so common.

To assess the impact of the gene variant upon disease the researchers calculated the "population attributable risk" -- the proportion of RLS cases that would disappear if the identified variant were removed or replaced by what is present in the control population. According to the findings of this study, a conservative estimate is that 50 percent of all RLS would disappear if this gene variant were eliminated.

This discovery also provides new information about a person's risk for developing RLS. Dr. Rye and colleagues discovered that the number of gene variant copies a person carries from birth influences his or her risk of developing RLS. One copy of the variant results in a nearly two-fold risk, and two copies of the gene variant results in as high as a four-fold risk for developing RLS.

Foundation website: http://www.rls.org/

Boehringer Ingelheim's RLSRest website: http://www.rlsrest.com/