Sleep "Kicking" Absolutely Fragments Sleep
Believe it or not, for decades and up to the present, controversies remain on whether RLS (restless legs) and PLMD (periodic limb movements) actually are legitimate sleep disorders. You can still find plenty of sleep doctors who completely ignore PLMD, though less so for RLS. The key to the discussion is whether or not these conditions directly impact sleep quality.
This recent study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, used a weak statistical method called meta-analysis where multiple datasets from different investigations are combined. This approach is weak, because if studies use poor measurements to investigate an idea, it doesn’t matter how many of the studies you put together, they are still looking at faulty data.
Nevertheless, in this study, there seemed to be some consistent findings demonstrated by the following comment in the Results section of the abstract, “significant reductions in total sleep time, sleep efficiency, stage N2 and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep percentages, and increases in wake time after sleep onset, stage shifts per hour, stage N1 percentage, REM latency, arousal index, and apnea-hypopnea index…” [in those with RLS] compared to healthy controls. Leg jerks were obviously higher in the RLS group.
Thus, the data clearly point to objective findings that sleep quality is worse in RLS, because it is either lighter sleep or fragmented sleep. For these reasons, it is important to consider RLS and PLMD as noteworthy sleep disorders.
Studies that look at treatment of RLS/PLMD generally give more solid evidence that the conditions must be problematic, because reversal of the limb movement symptoms leads to better sleep.