EAN 2025 | A study on the prevalence of idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder in the Spanish community

This is a population-based study in Spain, in Barcelona, and as it’s very difficult to perform a video polysomnography on all the participants of this type of study, we used a questionnaire such as the RBD1 question because it has a high negative predictive value. So said that first general practitioners of one primary healthcare facility asked this questionnaire to 332 consecutive patients that went to their visit for any reason and were aged more than 60 years old and they did not have any neurological neurodegenerative disorder. So this after they answered yes they were offered a visit with us in the sleep center. In total 32 patients said yes and all of them came to our sleep center. But not all of them accepted to perform a video polysomnography. 39% refused it, which has happened also in previous studies with similar methodology. And in the end 20 patients had a video polysomnography and four of them indeed had the definite idiopathic REM sleep behavior diagnosis that were three men and one woman, which is also known that typically is more frequent in males. And the other patients had other diagnoses. So in the end the prevalence, estimated prevalence in Barcelona was 1.2% of people older than 60 years old. And this is also important to understand the prevalence of this parasomnia because we need to understand how to perform feasible screening and diagnosis of this parasomnia that requires a video polysomnography still to perform in the future neuroprotective trials in these patients that have this high risk of developing neurodegenerative disorders.

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