Oh gosh... tremorgrrrl, I hope you had those cites in bookmarks or somewhere and that you didn't spend all that time looking for them for me.

I thank you for very much for posting them, though.

I actually think we're talking semantics in the use of the word "cause".

Stress or emotional issues do not cause a person to get tics/a tic 'disorder'.
Unfortunately, years ago Tics were once called "nervous tics" which really clouded the whole issue.

Many different types of stress (emotional and physical/different illnesses) can, as you suggest, exacerbate tics in some people who already have the tics/a tic 'disorder'. Strangely enough, some people who have tics find that they tic more when relaxed. It's one of those strange things.

I do so appreciate your taking all that effort to post for me.

Lara

Interesting. I guess it could be seen as an ancestral collective unconscious borrowing from Jung. Or it is Samsara (continuous suffering). In Christian faith it is Purgatory. It all makes sense...going back to Greece think of Sisyphus who must live out his days with struggling uphill with that boulder only to have it roll down hill over and over.

There is no comfort, but in a way we are the lucky ones. It's like PD has given us a wake up call that we need to make some serious life changes. It even gives us a built in stress monitor....not that I want it, but stress can strike in worse ways

Laura

Think about it a little more. The genes flip on and off as a reflection of the Past it is true. But that is the pallette that they use to paint the Future as it seems from the Present. What you expect colors what your are. We are not doomed to a particular fate. (OK, so there is the little matter of death but that is an entirely different set of metaphors ).

A woman named Candace Pert was part of the research team at the NIH that discovered the opioid receptor, became disenchanted with the competition within Big Science, and dropped out. In a later lecture, she said something similar to: "We found that we are far more like a flickering flame than a slab of meat."

---------------------------------

Another study found-

"The most important implication of this study is that people with the
same genetic makeup can be in different environments and have different
expression profiles," Idaghdour says. "The same gene can be expressed in
the city but not in a rural place because of the environment. So you
must look at the environment when studying associations between genes
and disease."

The article "A Genomewide Gene Expression Signature of Environmental
Geography in Leukocytes of Moroccan Amazighs" by Youssef Idaghdour and
Greg Gibson, North Carolina State University; John D. Storey, Princeton
University; and Sami J. Jadallah, HRH Prince Sultan International
Foundation for Conservation and Development of Wildlife, Agadir, Morocco
was published April 11, 2008, in PloS Genetics.

From today's Guardian-


"The precise mechanism by which traumatic experiences are transmitted from one generation to the next is still not known, but a picture is beginning to emerge.

Yehuda's work establishes low cortisol levels as a risk factor for developing PTSD and, when taken together with the animal studies, suggests that traumatic experiences can leave epigenetic marks that alter the stress response in offspring. Epigenetic factors combined with genetic variations could also explain why some people are more susceptible to stress than others, and why some of those exposed to the World Trade Centre attacks went on to develop PTSD while others did not. ....

....Last month, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania reported that epigenetic markers can be transmitted through two generations of mice, suggesting that children who inherited the nightmare of the World Trade Centre attack from their mothers while in the womb may in turn pass it on to their own children. "