BestieTwo of the major causes of death in the United States are cancer and heart disease. There are many different forms of heart disease in this world. The most common cause of heart disease is a blockage or narrowing of the coronary arteries. These arteries are the blood vessels that supply blood to the heart. This is the number one cause of death in the United States. With that said, a new study has been published which shows that a sensorimotor disorder called restless leg syndrome could raise the risk of heart-related deaths in older women.
Restless leg syndrome is a disorder that comes from the nervous system. It causes an immediate urge to move the legs. In most cases, this interferes with sleep, so it is also considered a sleeping disorder.
For more information regarding this new research, continue reading.
If you want to review the full study, you can find it published in the journal Neurology. This research indicates that restless leg syndrome affects between 4 and 29 percent of the adults that live in North America and Western Europe. In the United States, between 5 and 15 percent of the population are living with this condition that currently has no cure.
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Women and elderly adults are the most affected by this illness. The study that is published in the Neurology journal is led by Xiang Gao – an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University in State College. Gao’s goal was to investigate the link between restless leg syndrome and the mortality that is related to cardiovascular disease in women.
ESBProfessional/shutterstock.comAs I mentioned earlier, cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death for men and women. One in four deaths in the United States is related to a heart condition.
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In order to properly analyze the link between restless leg syndrome and cardiovascular disease in women, Gao, and his team took a look at data on 57,417 women. This data was provided by the Nurses’ Health Study.
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The average age of the women in the study is 67 and none of them had any cancer, cardiovascular disease or renal failure at the beginning of the study. Each of them was followed for 10 years to monitor their health.
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The study revealed that women who were diagnosed with restless leg syndrome had a greater risk of cardiovascular disease-related mortality. To be more specific, over the 10-year study, women with restless leg syndrome were about 43 percent more likely to die from heart disease than those who did not suffer from it.
designer491/shutterstock.comIn addition, the study also indicated that the longer women suffered from restless leg syndrome, the greater the risk of them suffering a CVD death was.
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Researchers also explained that those who suffer from restless leg syndrome are also at risk of suffering from other conditions as well. These include high blood pressure and obesity. Both increase the mortality risk of CVD. In order to eliminate the possibility that these conditions could be responsible for the CVD in each of the women, Gao did not include any women who were suffering from these conditions. Gao concludes that their research clarifies that restless leg syndrome affects CVD-related mortality specifically in older women.
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