When my dog does it — and I can even here a muffled/ruffled bark — I know that he is dreaming. Perhaps the reason for the research is to discover why some people are active during a dream and others are not; it just surprises me that dreaming was never mentioned where it comes to RLS in humans.

And what do they mean by “evidence that periodic limb movements in sleep is a genuine syndrome” – as opposed to what? A fake syndrome? Hypochondriac imagination of the patient gone wild? Such sentences tell as much about these researchers (and the entire field, not only “the critics”, I guess) as they tell about the disease. And I can vividly imagine the time and resources that have been spend to prove the patients wrong and shuffle them off into somatoform disorder cuckoo land. Here we have people who unfortunately have the problem of suffering from a non-lethal disease, which additionally seems to be defined by mainly symptoms and signs that could be faked – so sure, somebody must have suggested to these patients to fake some fake disease like RLS, as all genuine diseases are either lethal or have at least clearly defined and easily verifiable signs. Sorry, that just makes me angry.