Tuesday, April 05, 2011

ACC: Restless Legs May Be Bad for Heart

By Crystal Phend, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today Published: April 05, 2011 Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Dorothy Caputo, MA, RN, BC-ADM, CDE, Nurse Planner NEW ORLEANS -- Restless legs syndrome characterized by frequent leg movements during sleep appeared to be linked to structural heart problems, researchers found in a preliminary study. Patients with more than 35 bursts of leg movement per hour while sleeping carried a 1.85-fold elevated risk of severe left ventricular hypertrophy (P=0.002), Arshad A. Jahangir, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., and colleagues reported at the American College of Cardiology meeting. The association was strong, but whether it is causal or treatable remains unclear, Jahangir cautioned in presentation of the retrospective results at a press conference here. "We don't know whether restless leg syndrome -- what we are calling frequent leg movement disorder -- is a risk factor for hypertrophy," he told MedPage Today. "If it is, there are very effective treatments for this frequent leg movement disorder but whether there is an effect on consequences in terms of hypertrophy we don't know." Read the rest of the article here.

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