OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to identify the prevalence of restless legs syndrome (RLS) among pregnant Brazilian women, with individual diagnostic clinical interviews during the trimesters of pregnancy, and to determine the severity. METHODS: It was a cross-sectional study. We interviewed 524 pregnant women (18-45 years old) who came to the prenatal outpatient clinic to consult an obstetrician. We used a RLS clinical-diagnostic interview and the International RLS Study Group rating scale (IRLS). RESULTS: The prevalence of RLS during pregnancy was 13.5% in our sample, among which 90.1% of the cases started with their symptoms during pregnancy. More than half of the patients (53.5%) presented severe or very severe symptoms and the largest proportion of them (15.2%) were in their third trimester. We did not observe any demographic differences among the trimesters for RLS prevalence and RLS severity. CONCLUSION: RLS during pregnancy is more frequent than in the general population, such that more than half of the pregnant women with RLS present it severely or very severely. It occurs especially in the third trimester.
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