Restless Legs? – the $64,000 Question

Doctors like to be able to exclude a particular disease as quickly as possible, so they are glad when it can be achieved with just one question. Here’s the critical question for anyone with symptoms vaguely suggesting the fashionable Restless Legs Syndrome:

“When you try to relax in the evening or sleep at night, do you ever have unpleasant, restless feelings in your legs that can be relieved by walking or movement?”

In the general US population this question had a sensitivity approaching 100% - i.e. it picked up just about all restless legs syndrome patients tested. And it had a specificity of about 95%; it only captured a few ‘false positives’ – people without the syndrome but who answer ‘yes’.

(When they tested the question on family members of restless legs syndrome who didn’t have the syndrome, they got 20% false positives. But that was an ‘unusual population’ say the researchers.)

One doesn’t use the phrase “$64,000 Question” much these days, presumably because the sum has become somewhat trivial.