The Tourette Syndrome is a genetic condition that can be either hereditary or developed by children in the womb. Even if the exact cause of this syndrome has not been tracked down yet, scientists say that it is related to the communication of nerves in the brain, therefore a neurological disorder. Usually, an abnormal metabolism of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin are involved with the disorder. The onset of the syndrome mostly occurs at an early age, from 2 to 15 years.
The name of this condition comes from the French physician Georges Gilles de la Tourette who described in the mid 80's what the syndrome really consists of and analyzed nine patients that suffered from motor and vocal tics.
Tourette Syndrome is characterized by motor or vocal tics that last more than one year. Tics are abrupt, repetitive and involuntary muscular contractions or sounds. Besides motor or vocal, tics may be simple or complex.
The most common early symptoms consist of facial tics (eye blink, nose twitch, grimace) which are afterwards replaced or added to by other tics of the neck, trunk and limbs. These are included in the simple tics category.
Other persons can manifest complex tics that involve the whole body, such as kicking, stamping or repetitive thoughts.
The motor tic may as well be associated with vocal tics such as grunting, shouting, throat clearing etc. The vocal tics can come later to replace one or more motor tics. But both the motor and verbal tics can evolve to more ugly involuntary, rapid, repetitive, and stereotyped movements such as coprolalia or copropraxia.
Coprolalia is the medical term that defines the involuntary use of obscene words or socially inappropriate words and phrases, while copropraxia represents the repetitive involuntary use of obscene gestures. Coprolalia and copropraxia are sometimes associated with echolalia, which stands for the echo speech phenomenon. Echo speech refers to repeating words or movements of others or words of your own.
But the use of obscene utterances and behavior or echo speech are not necessarily symptoms of the Tourette syndrome as they are not needed in order to diagnose a patient as suffering from the Tourette syndrome. However, they can occur in a patient associated with other tics, but this is rather uncommon. For example, less than 15% of the patients with this condition exhibit coprolalia, according to the Tourette Syndrome Association.
Symptoms of this syndrome often occur in and individual connected with other disorders such as: attention and focus problems, defiant behavior, difficulties with the impulse control, learning disabilities, sleep disorder etc.
Up to present, researchers have not succeeded in finding a cure or a treatment method for the ones that suffer from the Tourette Syndrome, as the causes are not yet elucidated. However, most of the cases of this condition are mild ones and allow individuals exhibiting it to obtain academic performance and have a fulfilled and successful life.