Psychiatric comorbidity and neuropsychological changes in patients with restless-legs-syndrome

The majority of patients with restless-legs-syndrome (RLS) suffers from deficits in various neuropsychological areas. The aim of the study was to evaluate psychiatric comorbidity in RLS-patients and to investigate the neuropsychological profile in RLS patients with (RLS+) and without (RLS-) psychiatric comorbidity.

We used the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV to investigate psychiatric comorbidity. Furthermore we tested different domains in neuropsychology, especially general cognitive functioning, different aspects of attention and explicit and implicit memory.

Twenty-eight RLS patients participated in the study and in 12 patients we found at least one psychiatric diagnosis.The patients groups were compared to a group of 28 healthy controls (HC).

There were no differences between the two patients groups and the group HC in attentional tasks. In contrast, both RLS-groups showed significant impairments in explicit visual and verbal memory. In implicit memory, the RLS+ group showed the smallest learning effect, but these differences did not reach significance.

In summary both RLS patient groups demonstrated deficits in explicit memory, but no impairment in the field of attention and implicit memory. In other neuropsychological areas, there were some small but perhaps relevant differences between the two patients groups.

We discuss the results of the study with respect to possible structural and /or functional cerebral changes of the disease