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

AIM: 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. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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%. DISCUSSION: 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). CONCLUSIONS: 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.