Researchers Make Important Discovery for Restless Legs Syndrome Patients

Restless Legs Syndrome makes the simple act of sitting or lying down unbearable for sufferers. It leads to extreme fatigue and has a tremendous impact on everyday life. Sleep is almost impossible because your legs constantly feel like they have to move. Lack of sleep leads to being unproductive in school and at work. Just sitting in a chair to watch television, or sitting at a desk in an office, causes pain and the uncontrollable urge to move. Patients say they feel like their legs are creeping, itching, pulling, creepy-crawly, tugging, or gnawing all the time and resting only makes it worse.

There is good news on the horizon for sufferers though.

The Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation has announced that researchers have discovered a gene variant that contributes to the risk for developing RLS. This discovery will lead to new and better ways to detect RLS as well as new treatments for the condition. The research was conducted at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland

The variant is a very common one with almost 65% of the population of Iceland and the southeastern US carrying at lest one copy of the variant. Carrying the variant does not mean that you are going to contract RLS, it means you have more of a likelihood of developing it. If you have one of the other factors that can lead to RLS and you have the gene variant, your risk would rise higher.

They use a research tool called "population attributable risk" a way of calculating what percentage of RLS Cases would disappear if this particular variant was removed and the study showed that 50 of all RLS would disappear

One of the most significant findings to come out of this study in the information that was gained about a person's risk for developing RLS. The results showed that the number of copies of the gene variant that a person has from birth has a strong part to play in the risk that person has of developing RLS. With one variant, there is twice the risk, with two variants, there is also four times the risk of developing RLS as a person without the variant.