For the past three-hundred years, Tourette Syndrome has been speculated and theorized about. People with severe cases are usually the subject of many jokes and even outcast by their disorder. Science has come a long way, but there is still no cure, nor any facts about its causes. The disorder was named after George de la Tourette in 1883, a French Neurologist who studied it for many years. Several famous people including Mozart have been victims of this disorder. .
Tourette's symptoms usually begin between the ages of three and eight with motor tics. Starting off with periods of intense eye blinking or some other facial movement. Phonetic tics such as bouts of throat clearing or sniffing may begin as early as three. In uncomplicated cases, tics peak in the second decade of life and many people get better by nineteen or twenty. Severe cases of this disorder arise in adulthood and can have self-injurious motor tics, such as hitting biting and yelling obscenities, racial slurs and gestures. .
A few theories about Tourette include: "hereditary degeneration, irritation of the motor neural systems by toxic substances, of a self-poisoning bacteriological origin," to, "A constitutional inferiority of the sub cortical structures [that] renders the individual defenseless against overwhelming emotional and dynamic forces."(Leckman, 3) The symptoms of this disorder have been linked with obsessive compulsive disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, only when haliperidol, a neurotransmitter blocking drug proved effective, has the search for a Tourette cure shifted to neurophysiology.
Recently, research is suggesting that neurochemical dysfunction and morphological abnormalities may begin in the Basal Ganglia. The Basal Ganglia is a dense region of five nuclei located beneath the cortex. Postmortem studies .
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(basal ganglia).
of people with Parkinson's or Huntington's disease have shown its role in the control of movement.
