Heart diseases are one of the biggest causes of deaths in the United States.
One in four deaths in the United States is related to a heart disorder. Ther are various forms of heart diseases and most of them are caused by narrowing or blockage of coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart.
However, a new research has shown that restless leg syndrome, a sensorimotor disorder, can also cause heart-related deaths in older women. Restless leg syndrome is a nervous disorder that causes immediate surges of moving the legs. In many cases, it interferes with sleep, so it’s also considered to be a sleeping disorder.
The restless leg syndrome affects between 4 – 29% of the adults living in Western Europe and North America. In the United States, between 5 – 15% of the people are living with this condition that currently has no cure.
If you want to read the full research, you can find it in the journal Neurology.
Xiang Gao, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University in State College, is the lead author of the study. His goal was to find the link between restless leg syndrome and cardiovascular-related deaths in women.
For properly analyzing the relation between restless leg syndrome and cardiovascular deaths in women, Gao, and his team collected data for more than 57,000 women.
This data was acquired from the Nurses’ Health Study.
The average age of the women in the research was 67 and no woman included in the study had renal failure, cancer, or any cardiovascular disease at the start of the study.
Study authors followed each woman for about 10 years for the purpose of monitoring their health.
The study concluded that women who had restless leg syndrome were more likely to have cardiovascular diseases.
To be more specific, over the study period of 10 years, women with restless leg syndrome were 43% more likely to die from cardiovascular diseases as compared to the women who weren’t suffering from restless leg syndrome.
In addition to that, it was also observed that women had greater risks of suffering a CVD death if they were suffering from restless leg syndrome for a long time.
Furthermore, researchers also established that restless leg syndrome was associated with other diseases as well such as obesity and high blood pressure, both of which also increase the mortality risk of CVD.
Gao concludes their research shows that CVD-related mortality is related to restless leg syndrome, particularly in older women.