What is the biggest impact of Tourette’s syndrome on children?

  Tourette’s syndrome, also known as Tourette’s syndrome, begins in children aged 3 to 10 years old, most often aged 4 to 7 years old, and is characterized by an involuntary, sudden, rapid, recurrent, non-purposeful, non-articulated movement or vocalization.  The main clinical manifestations of Tourette’s syndrome are progressive development of multiple sites and forms of motor tics and one or more vocal tics, and the coexistence of motor and vocal tics. The symptoms usually start with a single motor twitch of the eyes and face (blinking), which is sporadic, and then gradually progress to twitches of the neck, shoulders, limbs, and trunk (nodding, shrugging, striking, kicking, etc.), which persist.  The twitching and obscene symptoms involve many parts of the body and are frequent, which have a greater emotional and psychological impact on the child. About half of the children have obsessive-compulsive symptoms, half have attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder symptoms, and some have self-injurious behavior, mood disorders, or learning difficulties.  Children with tic disorders often have fluctuating symptoms, which may be mild or severe, and sometimes may resolve on their own for a period of time. The site, frequency and intensity of the tics can change, and can worsen when the child is stressed, anxious, fatigued, or sleep deprived, and decrease when the child is relaxed, and disappear after sleep. Tic disorder is not a so-called bad problem, but it can be harmful. Some children with the disease can be accompanied by inattention, learning difficulties, emotional disorders and other psychological problems.  At present, in terms of treatment, there are medications and surgical treatments, common drugs such as aripiprazole and haloperidol, many of which are also attempted treatments to try to improve some of the symptoms in some children. Medications can be started in small doses, slowly increasing the dosage to reduce side effects.  When there is only partial improvement of symptoms with a single medication or when there are complex concomitant symptoms in tic-abhyxia syndrome, deep brain electrical stimulation treatment can be considered to improve the child’s symptoms by stimulating the relevant neural nuclei with microcurrent and improving the pattern of abnormal discharge. The brain pacemaker treatment for Tourette’s syndrome is currently the best internationally recognized treatment for Tourette’s syndrome, and the success rate of this procedure for Tourette’s syndrome is also high, which avoids the side effects of taking medication and prevents the recurrence of the disease.