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EAN 2026 | Optimizing care for patients with RLS: the value of mobile applications
Julian Spinks, MBBS, Medway Practices Alliance, Maidstone, United Kingdom, shares insights into restless legs syndrome (RLS), highlighting how pain and other symptoms can affect patients’ sleep and have a detrimental effect on everyday life. Dr Spinks describes how mobile applications can be utilized to help patients relax, practice mindfulness, and track symptoms. This interview took place at the 12th Congress of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Transcript
Restless leg syndrome, a syndrome which actually causes an intense urge to move your legs together with an unpleasant sensation in the leg, sometimes painful. Sounds bad enough during the day but the big problem is it’s much worse at night and it causes repeated waking so you lose sleep and that happens day after day and that carries forward into the next day, people have problems working, there’s danger driving because you’re sleep-deprived and so on...
Restless leg syndrome, a syndrome which actually causes an intense urge to move your legs together with an unpleasant sensation in the leg, sometimes painful. Sounds bad enough during the day but the big problem is it’s much worse at night and it causes repeated waking so you lose sleep and that happens day after day and that carries forward into the next day, people have problems working, there’s danger driving because you’re sleep-deprived and so on. Now, if you go back 15-20 years, we thought we had it cracked, we had dopamine agonists which were fantastic at treating RLS. Unfortunately, they turn out to cause things like augmentation, worsening of the condition, and impulse control disorder, and the other drugs, which are also just not ideal. So, what’s happening is that a lot of people with the disease, people are looking at whether IT apps and so on can make a difference, and so I’m discussing the fact that we have some apps that can perhaps help people cope with the unpleasant sensations, can help them relax, practice mindfulness, and also perhaps track their symptoms in a way that can be passed on to their clinician to help them design treatment going forward.
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