Tourette's goes deeper than just cursing, tics

By Gina Vasselli
Edited by Jennifer Silverman
Feb. 18, 2009

Dylan Sharp sniffs and clears his throat over and over, the sound echoing through the Sharp family's small Aiken house.

The repetitive sniffing and throat noises started when he was 7. His parents took him to doctors and allergists. They did everything they could think of to get him to stop. Nothing changed until this August, two years later, when Dylan woke up shaking his head and buckling his knees.

The Sharps went to a neurologist who recognized the sniffing, coughing, head shaking and knee buckling: Dylan has Tourette's syndrome.

In December, "Front of the Class," a Hallmark movie about a teacher's struggle with Tourette's, aired on CBS. Two months earlier Tourette's was the butt of many jokes in an episode of Comedy Central's animated show "South Park."

Tourette's is widely known by one of its least common symptoms, yelling out curse words uncontrollably, but only about 15 percent of the 200,000 Americans with Tourette's have the cursing tic, according to the Tourette Syndrome Association Web site.

The association doesn't keep state-by-state statistics on the number of people with Tourette's, and the South Carolina health department doesn't keep statistics for the state.

French physician Georges Gilles de la Tourette was the first to define the movement disorder. To have Tourette's, a person must have both vocal and motor tics for at least a year, said Dr. James Eugene Edwards, a child psychiatrist at the University of South Carolina Medical School.

Sniffing, throat clearing and eye blinking are some of the most common tics, the involuntary, repetitive behaviors that are a symptom of Tourette's.

Even without cursing, living with Tourette's can be emotionally and physically painful.

Michelle McGee of Savannah, Ga., said her 11-year-old son, Jacob, was diagnosed with Tourette's when he was 6. For a while, one of his tics was to punch himself in the stomach.

"What do you do when you watch your child do this and he's crying saying, ‘I don't want to do this'?" McGee said.

Tracy Colletti-Flynn, a spokeswoman for the Tourette Syndrome Association, said about half the people with Tourette's also have conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

For instance, Jacob McGee was also diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder when he was 8.

Tourette's patients often must prioritize which disorder is really disabling their life, said Dr. Vanessa Hinson of the Medical University of South Carolina movement disorders clinic in Charleston.

Michelle McGee said the family decided to medicate Jacob for his OCD when he had to be rushed to the hospital after almost choking because of his compulsion to put things in his mouth. But the tics haven't progressed to the point where the family wants to put Jacob on anti-psychotic medicines, such as Risperdal, that can help stop the tics.

No medicines specifically treat Tourette's, Colletti-Flynn said.

Even if a person with Tourette's doesn't have ADD or ADHD, the tics themselves can make it hard to concentrate. Jeff Sharp said he watches his son struggle to stop the tics so he can do his homework.

"The amount of time he spends actually doing the work is only a few minutes," Jeff said. "It's taken him an hour and a half to do 20 minutes' worth of work."

Hinson said the tics can be suppressed but often result in more tics than usual afterward. "It's so similar to an itch," she said. "We can resist that sensation, but then you just have to do it."

Tics come and go with varying levels of severity, and sometimes new tics replace others.

Dylan struggled to describe what it was like to try and stop a tic. He said it gave him an anxious, almost excited feeling. But for his mother, the days when Dylan's tics are most frequent are also the most worrisome.

"You think, is this what it's going to be like?" she said.

Tourette's tics usually peak around ages 11 to 13 and decrease in severity and frequency as the patients get older, said Edwards, the child psychiatrist.

The cause of Tourette's is unknown, but there is a genetic connection, Edwards said. Colletti-Flynn said about half the time there is some kind of tic disorder in the family.

Edwards said Tourette's doesn't affect intelligence and that people often misunderstand it.

The Sharps said they didn't know about it before but are making a point now to educate people and dispel some of the myths.

Dylan "may be a little bit different, but everybody is," Jeff Sharp said. "Everyone's got their thing and this just happens to be his."