Restless Leg Syndrome Linked to Kidney Disease, Stroke
Patients with restless leg syndrome (RLS) could have an increased risk of stroke, coronary heart and kidney disease, and early mortality, according to a recent study.
“Restless legs syndrome is a common sleep disorder, but there is a paucity of large cohort studies examining the association of restless legs syndrome with clinical outcomes, including all-cause mortality, incident coronary heart disease, stroke and chronic kidney disease,” said the study’s authors.
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For their study, researchers selected 7392 patients m roughly half of which had a new RLS diagnosis and the other half did not have RLS. All RLS participants were matched to the control group based on over 20 demographic and clinical variables and was followed for an 8-year duration.
During the study period, researchers evaluated for any new cases of chronic kidney disease, death, coronary heard disease, and stroke.
“Associations were examined using Cox models. The mean ± SD age of the propensity-matched cohort at baseline was 59 ± 12 years; 89 and 8% of patients were white and black, respectively; 31% of the patients were diabetic; and the mean baseline estimated glomerular filtration rate was 83.9 ± 15.1 mL min−1 1.73 m−2,” explained the study’s authors.
The study showed that patients in the RLS group had a 4-fold higher likelihood of stroke manifestation and a 3 times greater risk of developing kidney disease than controls.
Those with RLS were also 88% more likely to die during the follow-up period than those without RLS, although the gap between both groups was narrow.
The complete study is published in the September issue of Journal of Sleep Research.
-Michelle Canales Butcher
Reference:
Miklos Z, Lu JL, Kalantar-Zadeh K, et al. Association of incident restless legs syndrome with outcomes in a large cohort of US veterans. J Sleep Res. 2015 September [epub ahead of print] doi: 10.1111/jsr.12335.