Tourette’s syndrome affects more males, occurs early and tends to regress around 25 years. Tourette Syndrome is a serious neurological disorder characterized by motor tics and sound obsessive and involuntary repetition of words, attention deficit, and sometimes compulsive self-injurious behaviors. These are the symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome, a disease little known in Italy that involves between 500 and 600 thousand people, of which 100 thousand and 10 thousand severe serious. Explains Mauro Porta, neurologist and director of the Center Tourette Extrapyramidal Diseases IRCCS Galeazzi, Milan, single Italian center for the treatment of this disease and also worldwide leader.

“It is a neurological disorder, not psychiatric, as has long been believed. In early onset, usually around 5, 6 years with a male preponderance (the ratio is 5 males 3 females). Reaches its peak at school age and then regress spontaneously around 25 years (two thirds of patients)”

Tourette’s syndrome, named after the French neurologist who described for the first time in 1885, is characterized by the presence of attention deficit disorders: typical case the child is never close and are constantly scolded by the teacher. Tic sound, for example, the teenager who coughs for a nonexistent discomfort in the throat, 0 motor tics, such as constantly flapping his eyelids. Up to events that put the crisis in social life, as the tendency to smell and touch others, to emit strange sounds, scratching in an obsessive.

“Because of the complexity of its symptoms is a disease difficult to diagnose: Before you go to the eye because you maybe blinked, then the teachers sent by a psychologist, or dall’otorino, because they think that the child does not feel well and so on. ”

But actually the identity is clear, even if the causes of the syndrome, not yet fully known, however, do suggest a genetic predisposition associated with streptococcal infection betaemolitico acting as the triggering factor. To cure the disease, using different drugs: the new generation neuroleptics such as the antihypertensive clonidine, from antidepressants to nicotine.

In extreme cases can be proposed that the Deep Brain Stimulation, which consists in the installation of microelectrodes into specific brain areas. But often enough instead use the Habit Reversal ie the attempt to mask the tics. An example? Use a handkerchief to disguise the tic to bring up his nose.

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