Serial pharmacological prescribing practices for tic management in Tourette syndrome.

Pharmacological treatments for Tourette syndrome (TS) vary in efficacy between different patients. The evidence base is limited as even high quality controlled studies tend to be of relatively short duration which may lose relevance in clinical usage. Patients are frequently treated with serial agents in the search for efficacy and tolerability. The success of this strategy has not been previously documented. We examined 400 consecutive TS patients seen over a 10-year period, some with a longer prior history in other clinics; 255/400 (64%) were prescribed medication. We present this heterogeneous cohort in terms of the number of drugs they had tried, and as a proxy measure of some benefit of the last drug used, whether it had been prescribed under our supervision for ≥ 5 months. The most commonly prescribed medications were aripiprazole (64%), clonidine (40%), risperidone (30%) and sulpiride (29%) with changes in prescribing practises over the period examined. The number of different drugs tried were one (n = 155), two (n = 69), three (n = 36), four (n = 14), five (n = 15), six (n = 5), seven (n = 2) and eight (n = 1). The data illustrate the difficulty in drug treatment of tics and suggest that even after trials of several agents there is potential benefit in trying further options.

Emotional processing and executive functioning in children and adults with Tourette's syndrome.

Tourette's syndrome (TS) is predominantly a childhood disorder, with many of those who meet diagnostic criteria in childhood experiencing a remission of symptoms in adulthood. This indicates that the influence of TS on cognitive and emotional processing can best be understood by examining performance in both adults and children with TS. The present study examined emotional processing using a battery of face and prosody tasks with increasing levels of difficulty (same-different emotion discrimination, emotion naming, and emotion naming with conflict for prosody only). Experiment 1 compared the performance of children with TS-alone (n = 16) or TS+ADHD (n = 15) to healthy matched control children (n = 27). Compared to healthy control children, no significant group differences were found for those with TS-alone. Children with TS+ADHD showed subtle impairments on the more difficult emotion processing tasks relative to healthy control children, and differences were more pronounced for anger items (voice emotion naming, p < .05; voice emotion naming with conflict, p < .01). Experiment 2 compared the performance of adults with TS-alone (n = 23) to healthy matched controls (n = 21). No significant group differences were found, other than evidence of subtle impairment in the adults with TS-alone on the most complex task, again particularly for anger items (p < .05). Separate measurement of executive skills detected no evidence of impairment in children or adults with TS and little in the way of correlational evidence linking emotion recognition and executive skills. Implications of the findings for our understanding of emotion processing in TS are discussed.