Prevalence of anxiety disturbs in patients with Tourette syndrome and tic disturb

Abstract

Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by a wide phenotypic polymorphism and this heterogeneity is due partly to the association with several neuropsychiatry disorders. These comorbidities are showed in the 90% of TS cases. The aim of this transversal study is to analyze the presence and prevalence of different psychopathological conditions that could be expressed with tic disorder (TD) and specifically in TS. We examined a sample of 102 patients, between 7 and 17.6 years old, with a diagnosis DSM-IV-TR of TD, using the self-report SAFA. Different correlations between these comorbidities and clinical variables are also analyzed. Our data underlined most of all a prevalence of anxiety disorders in the 31.4% of our patients with TD, of depression in the 27.44%, and of somatization symptoms in the 22.54%. Anxiety disorders seem to be linked with the variables of patients'age, duration of disease, gender, pharmacological treatment and presence of comorbidity for obsessive-compulsion disorder (OCD). This study suggests the important prevalence of non-OCD anxiety disorders in TD patients and shows they have a central role in their psychopathological profile. However, the basilar question if these disturbs are primary or secondary to the TD is still to be clarify.