Two independent teams, one in Germany and one in Iceland, have identified three variant sites on the human genome which predispose people to the condition. The advance should help scientists understand the biological basis of the disorder, which could lead to new ideas for treatment.
The new findings may also make restless legs syndrome easier to define, resolving disputes about how prevalent it really is. The disorder is a “case study of how the media helps make people sick,” two researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, wrote recently in the journal PLoS Medicine. They argued that its prevalence had been exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies and uncritical newspaper articles, and that giving people diagnoses and powerful drugs were serious downsides of defining the elusive syndrome too broadly.” (New York Times )
Throughout my psychiatric career, I have had a strong interest in the faddish diagnoses interest in which is spread by grapevine, media attention and advertising. These are the diagnoses with which patients are invested in being diagnosed. Some, of course, are legitimately advocating for the ‘missing link’ in explaining troubling symptoms they have been experiencing. But for others, the incentive is secondary gain of one sort or another.
Usually, the diagnoses around which this phenomenon clusters are medically unvalidated and ill-defined. A vicious circle ensues, in which, the more vague a diagnosis is, the more heterogeneous the group of self-identified sufferers becomes and the more difficult it is to find homogeneous empirical attributes of the diagnosis. In short, such diagnoses spread like viral memes.
Consequences include having a pretext for dysfunction for which one ought to be taking responsibility; and needless drug therapy, sometimes with risks or side effects making the “cure worse than the disease.” The epidemic of stimulant prescribing for the faddish and vastly overused diagnosis of ADHD, as FmH readers know, is one of the more egregious examples of this trend. As a psychopharmacologist, I would never have guessed, but indeed welcome the fact, that my work would turn out to be in such large part “just saying no.”
