Restless Leg Syndrome - How To Treat It (RLS)

restless leg syndrome or Willis Ebon syndrome so you had restless legs you said you had it so you don't have it anymore I would say that I had it I still have like periodic L movements but definitely that the debilitating part is definitely gone okay let's tell people at the end of this video how you got rid of it welcome to talking with docs Dr Brad weening I'm Dr Paul Z today we're going to be talking about something that's very personal to me or used to be more personal I cuz I had it you had restless legs I definitely 100% % had restless leg syndrome ask my wife you look like you have restless teeth syndrome I you know what that means so so we're going to talk all about it we're going to talk about some of the uh symptoms how you diagnose it and potentially what to do for it it's a it's a little it's it's a tricky thing and it affects a lot of people so stick around and leave a comment if you have restless leg syndrome there's a lot of you out there so leave a comment say how much bugs you and say what you've done that's had some success to help the other people so you're like not only a phys talking about it you're also a patient who had also definitely PTI we had this before with other things right yeah you liked it so much you bought the company yes thankfully I'm recovered mostly so we'll share the story of on how that happen are you though yeah I'm I'm fidgety by Nature okay right it's like that song Naughty by Nature except I'm fidgety fidgety by Nature all right that's just that's just my my character like I'm a little bit high you're just you got restless syndrome I got restless yeah for sure I think I have apathetic leg syndrome you yeah this just don't feel like moving sometimes I know I I Haven been accused of being well we'll talk about okay okay so Restless Leg Center what is it so it's exactly like it sounds so people that have restless legs and when you ask someone to describe it there's a a wide variety of descriptions and it's a it's an overwhelming urge to to move your legs and that feels like your Skin's crawling you can't really describe it and the reason that this is actually it's a neurological disorder where your brain is telling your legs to move and some people say maybe this relates to anxiety from old like fight ORF flight kind of stuff we don't totally understand it and even the people that are dealing with it don't totally understand it yeah we've been looking at it for many many years hundreds of years it's been recognized I mean you may not have heard about it it's not one of the more common things that we discuss in medicine however it is a very common thing up to 5 to 10% of the population yes and has this up to 20% of of pregnant women they think maybe because the iron is going to the baby but yeah first described in 1670 2 okay by Sir Thomas Willis of the Willis Ebon and he's not Different Strokes Willis no and not Bruce Willis okay so Sir Thomas Wills was a very interesting guy and at the beginning of medicine I think it would have been a neat time because a lot of stuff wasn't discovered so you kind of get credit for a lot of stuff if you at the front you know I would have loved it I would take anything they be like zzza syndrome I'll take like a pimple on the end of the nose if you get a pimple on the end of the nose that's Paul's pimple it's Paul's pimple if you have a pathologic intolerance for incompetence it's Dr weaning syndrome weing syndome I feel like that could be Z syndrome as well okay so so what happened so this guy very interesting guy in the early day ages of medicine and actually he was responsible for a bunch of different stuff he was one of the first people to talk about um type two diabetes and the sweet urine diabetes was actually called Willis disease back in the day yeah so I think the sweet urine came from uh China and possibly India he we pic they picked up on it pretty late he's an a British guy English yes but he was one of the first guys that I guess to write about it former um he was a guy who identified the arterial structure at the base of her brain something called The Circle of Willis so people in medicine or medical students would know about this an anatomic structure named that I know and he was also one of the first guys to number the cranial nerves that's right I read that which we still used to say 12 12 pairs of cranial nerves nerves in your head face and 12 of them and he was the first one to name it back in like the 1600s and we still use that same numerical system that he came up with and he was friends with people like Einstein and John Lock like sociologist wait a minute you could have been friends with Einstein yeah no not Einstein sorry um Newton Newton Newton yeah like like really prominent features of of the time yeah um another interesting thing is actually he revived a woman back from from Death him and his friend um a woman was charged with a crime and she was actually hung and put in a coffin they donated her body she was hanged yeah so that's not something I use very often no yeah well these days yeah thankfully um and her body was donated to science and they opened up the coffin and she was coughing and that's where the name cofin came I don't think so but maybe is it I just made that part be cool anyway so she was coughing so him and his friend who were going to dissect her said revived her and she survived Anne green was her name an green yeah lives to tell the story another day so that's the Willis and then the E bomb uh Carl Axel e bomb was a Swedish Swedish Swedish neurologist who went on to further describe the symptoms and the treatment and Stu like that so he got put on that he's way later way later 1995 like just recent I mean this this disorder is I think it's underdiagnosed I would agree under not talked about enough right and so here it is okay so diagnostic criteria so there are five of them this has been formalized by a group that uh deals with restless leg syndrome so the first one is that you have this irreversible urge to move your leg so you actually have restless legs that's number one uh the symptoms come on when you're when you're resting is that the other right so when you're kind of getting ready to go to bed typically or you're in a resting phase um number three is that it's usually at night very rarely do people have restless legs in the morning or during the day um the fourth criteria is that they get better with movement right and then the last one like a lot of medical diagnostic criteria is that it can't be um readily identified as a cause or a result of something else like a a formal medical condition or behavioral condition so if you had like bad veins or if you had neurological disorder in your lower legs and that caus legs Parkinson's dise or something like that then that's not restless legs and so this is a syndrome so there's no diagnostic test for a syndrome is a collection of symptoms that we plump together and call it a syndrome because we don't have like a diagnostic test there's nothing you can look at under the microscope that says yeah this is what it is right so who ends up going to their doctor you you get to decide kind of a little bit for yourself a lot of people have it and just kind of manage it but if your symptoms become so severe they've become disruptive to your life preventing you from able to to sleep or have a normal relation ship or do your job or whatever then that's when people would go uh see their typically their Primary Care primary care doctor but often a lot of primary care doctors don't know a lot about this and don't do a lot with Russ SL syndrome no it's not it's not a well described or that well known or that well taught in medical school to be honest right so if if you see your family doctor and they don't know about it they may send you on to a sleep specialist so sometimes that could be a a subpal do with inter internal medicine or often a neurologist because it SE actually as a neurological disorder really and now what's the neurologist going to we've talked about the symptoms we talked going to go see your doctor there are although although there's no diagnostic test for it there are some tests that you might have done that might indicate that you have it although they're not diagnostic they're associated with restless leg right so so one thing that they've found that is is more common than not in people that have wrestles like syndr is actually a low iron level so we don't know exactly why but this is common and this is also why they think 20% of pregnant women have it that maybe the iron is being shunted to grow a human being inside of you and then that's resulting in a low iron level so a lot of doctors would start with a iron test it is it is a little bit more common in pregnant women than the average population up to 20% whereas 5 to 10 in the regular population yeah low magnesium that's also been associated with it and and low iron is actually a little tricky to to test you mean you could have a low hemoglobin but sometimes you can still have low um blood iron but they've shown you could actually have lower brain iron the way that it um is tested or the way it's actually isolated so that's not necessarily a guaranteed way but I think these two things are important magnesium and iron and then the other one is a sleep study so usually would not order specifically a sleep study to diagnose restless leg syndromes but often if you have um insomnia or if you have thought of sleep apnea then you go for this test and they say okay well now you you got restless legs or you talk about it and they realize maybe you got restless legs other thing that you often will find on the sleep study is that you have what are called increased periodic limb movements right so you went for the sleep study and and they say know your breathing's fine but you have restless legs and you're like how'd you know well Jim you got up and tried to walk out the door three times in the middle of the night right so personally speaking I have had a sleep study okay so see because um because I did so when I first got married my wife was like are you on something because you're like I often would get up in the middle of the night because my legs would be so restless and it'd be like 12 or one in the morning I'd walk around and got in this habit of going to drink chocolate milk in the middle of the night because I was convinced that that was going to allow me to go to sleep because it got to the point where I'd just be lying there and then I'd be getting anxious about not getting sleep because I had a busy day the next day it was like a vicious cycle like a lot of people that can't sleep properly do so I went for the sleep study and what did they say I say well you don't sleep Avenue that's good and that's an important one we've talked about this in other videos that can have a lot of significant implications for your your General Health particularly your heart um but I had a lot of what are called periodic limb movements so my legs would kind of be moving around I have the Jimmy Legs yeah yeah because she's thren off my whole sleep she's got the Jimmy Legs Jimmy leg Jimmy leg Yeah sheets are on the floor by the end of the night or I be kicking my wife and she's at lights she's on the floor by the end like what the heck you're preventing me from getting sleep but I but then they take the history and they're like oh well you sounds like you have restless legs and periodic limb movement so they kind of go together but they are definitely not the same thing so she went for a sleep study to see what was wrong with her and they saidt you slept perfectly that's right it was amazing and the studies themselves you would think you're not going to get a good sleeve you have like probes on your head head and on your on your chest and and it's a weird room and stuff like that people are watching you but I I actually had a pretty good sleeve which is interesting legs except for the legs okay Willis before we give away how you got rid of it okay stick around to the end how you got rid of it yes let's talk about some of the common treatments that are available now now like with anything no treatment is 100% no treatment is perfect and no individual might not benefit from the same treatment as someone else you may have different different response to treatment but some of the common things that we talk about to treat right certain medications yeah and I'd say the or supplements I'd say the first one is is obvious if you have low iron you probably should treat your iron and this is going to be guided by a physician it would start typically with oral supplements but but iron you can't just take willy-nilly there are consequences to it so it should be done supervised willly Willis neilly if you do have really low iron it's refractory to oral supplementation then you may require intravenous iron this is a common treatment for people that have iron so discuss that with your family doctor if that's one of things so start let's correct always a fun thing to do some complications with getting intren iron no and the reason that other reason that they think iron is important is because of its effect on dopamine in your brain because a lot of the restless legs kind of comes back to dopamine and iron often is transported with dopamine and it has a dependency with the receptors so they're they're very intimately related so the iron affects dopamine it's kind of cool because dopamine's intimately related with Parkinson's disease half of physiology and actually L dopa is one of the treatment for par and dopamine class medications are also used to treat restless leg syndrome right so for a while I was on a medication called prexl because I was like this is brutal you got to get some you got to get some for those legs because it's crazy and um so I I tried this for a while it actually worked pretty well I was not the best at remembering when to take it you have to take it like an hour hour and a half before bed and by the time you're going to bed you're like I forgot to pill or whatever um doctors are the worst with compliance the worst the worst seeing a doctor and the worst doing what I'm told um so it did work actually pretty well if I remember to take it in a Tim fashion so yeah so the essentially the parkinsonian class drugs are are worth considering one thing that has been shown though unfortunately that the longer that you take it and as your dose increases to get an effect sometimes you can suffer from something called augmentation where paradoxically as the dose goes up your symptoms go up and these symptoms will improve as you reduce your dose again but then you're kind of back stuck because now your your symptoms have gone back down but now you're not taking the medications they go back up it's a little Tri so how's that for one of the Medical Treatments here's a medical treatment for you it should get rid of your problem there's a chance it makes it worse yeah all right and yeah Gabapentin class so the kind of the nerve we talked kind of nerve problem then there's narcotics narcotics is a class of drugs that are sometimes which I found shocking and I think it's probably more historical than my guess is currently just because we're so nervous about narcotics and our bodies do get used to narcotics so your dose would likely have to go up over time so and there is an oid crisis in the world right now so we we use those as sparingly as possible yeah and that's that's Tramadol oxycodone even methadone was mentioned as one of the treatments so um the other thing that I would say is a big part of the treatment is and we've talked about this before it's good sleep hygiene so some people talk about exercise again there seems to be a U-shaped curve when it comes to exercise if you're really inactive that can make it worse sometimes people that do really strenuous exercise right before bed that can make it worse so somewhere in between so not being inactive but maybe not being too active yeah leave a comment if you find exercise helps some people talk about a cold shower or a warm bath yeah who knows find a Groove yeah um the one thing that we didn't mention about the supplements that very commonly is talked about but there's not a lot of good scientific evidence necessarily for is magnesium that seems to play a role in so many functions we've talked about this before so whether that's oral magnesium supplementation whether it's using epom salts in a bath or even topical rub magnesium potentially can play a role or your diet if you can get the magnesium in your diet that's also we think anything that you can get in your diets better better than a supplement know you can all right I think we should tell people how yeah so so I had this for forever like decades as long as I can remember and then I started to realize hey I'm not having this as much and I went like plant-based with my wife about five and a half years ago or something like that and it seemed to have gone away I'm certainly not saying this is the cure I'm not like a anti- meat person hey do what I do um it worked for me I probably won't work for everybody but you think you then for you it was some Primal drive to go hunting in the middle of the night when you were a carnivore oh maybe yeah maybe and then I was like I don't need time do you think that's what it was no I don't think it was either you think Elvis Presley had it g yeah may maybe I'm not Michael Jackson maybe maybe the moonwalk came from Russ's L possibly well we have Willis and Ecom to thank for this and uh there I mean it's it's kind of not a ton known about it nope underdiagnosed probably quite common in the Community more common in pregnant women potentially very debilitating so you're not alone and go talk to your doctor there are some potential helps and um hopefully just getting it out there with this video gets you to talk about if you think you might have it go see a healthcare provider see if you can get that diagnosis and then start some treatment for it now you know like this video please like it subscribe to our Channel and remember you are in charge of your home see you next time

Channel: Talking With Docs

Views: 16,382

Keywords: restless leg syndrome, restless legs syndrome, restless leg syndrome treatment, restless leg syndrome symptoms, restless leg syndrome relief, restless leg syndrome cure, restless leg syndrome causes, what causes restless leg syndrome, what is restless leg syndrome, restless legs syndrome treatment, symptoms of restless leg syndrome, restless legs syndrome causes, restless legs syndrome symptoms, restless legs, restless leg treatment, restless leg syndrome remedies

Id: jPUPQ93Wfv0

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024