In Your Classroom: "The Business of Disease (Restless Legs Syndrome)"

by Sharon Radford     Department: In Your Classroom

Maybe you were like me when the Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) ads first started showing on television, not believing that RLS was real, thinking that it was a fabricated condition to sell more pharmaceuticals.  Or conversely, maybe you suffer from RLS and became impatient with non-believers like me. I am now convinced that RLS is a real condition that we can use in the classroom when we study brain and nervous system function.

The video centers on the business of marketing pharmaceuticals, but it also touches on several aspects of brain function that I have not mentioned before.  For example, the drugs used to treat RLS are dopamine agonists, which means that they mimic dopamine, originally intended for use with people suffering from Parkinson's disease.  In a unit on the brain, one could have students explore the role of dopamine in normal brain function. The University of Utah's website, is an excellent resource for this topic.  Not only is it interactive and fun for students, but it has links to other dopamine functions, such as the connection between dopamine and ritalin, for example, which may be quite pertinent to many students.

If students want more information on Parkinson's disease itself, the Mayo Clinic has a comprehensive overview which covers symptoms and causes as well as treatment.  This site contains an extensive explanation of the various medications for Parkinson's disease, including dopamine agonists and explains how they work in the brain to alleviate the symptoms.  Interestingly, this site also refers to deep brain stimulation as a treatment, a topic on another WIRED science episode.

A separate topic which fits with RLS and brain function is the issue of sleep and sleep deprivation, a subject about which many of our students have personal experience.  However, I would be willing to bet that many of them do not know why sleep is important, or how lack of sleep can impact their health.  The Sleep Foundation site is a good one, covering such topics as mechanisms controlling sleep and wakefulness, the stages of sleep, why sleep matters and sleep disorders, including Restless Leg Syndrome. 

We all know that lack of sleep can affect our mood and attention, but students may be surprised to learn from this site that lack of sufficient sleep over just a few days can impair alertness and memory.  Moreover, lack of sleep is correlated with obesity, the immune system, and cardiovascular disease.  Part of these effects is due to the effect of sleep on hormones such as growth hormone and leptin.  The fact that RLS can interfere with normal sleep thus becomes crucial to health.

To explore the topic of sleep further, go to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute site, one of my favorites. You can find information on biological clocks there.  You can also order the Holiday Lecture DVD, "Clockwork Genes: Discoveries in Biological Time."  This site provides a wealth of information and interactive lessons about circadian rhythms and the function of the suprachiasmatic nuclei which control these rhythms.

Finally, the discovery of a gene specifically associated with RLS establishes the condition as a real phenomenon and may lead to further treatments.  WebMD presents the information about the gene that was first announced in The New England Journal of Medicine.  In this study, Kari Stefansson from Iceland and David Rye from Emory University in Atlanta, studied the genes of 306 people in Iceland with RLS and more than 15,000 people who did not have the syndrome.  They were able to find three variants of a gene known as BTBD9 that are tied to RLS.  What does the gene do?  We don't yet know, yet knowing the variants make screening possible, and when we find out what the gene does, it is possible to produce therapies that are directly targeted to the gene product.

Additional WIRED Science Video Segments
Don't forget to check out our Video Section for other segments from WIRED Science that you can use in your classroom.

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