Restless legs syndrome (RLS) is a sensorimotor disorder with an age-dependent prevalence of up to 10% in the general population above 65 years of age. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWA) for RLS in 922 cases and 1,526 controls (using 301,406 SNPs) followed by a replication of 76 candidate SNPs in 3,935 cases and 5,754 controls, all of European ancestry.
Herein, we identified six RLS susceptibility loci of genome-wide significance, two of them novel: an intergenic region on chromosome 2p14 (rs6747972, P = 9.03 x 10(-11), OR = 1.23) and a locus on 16q12.1 (rs3104767, P = 9.4 x 10(-19), OR = 1.35) in a linkage disequilibrium block of 140 kb containing the 59-end of TOX3 and the adjacent non-coding RNA BC034767.