Another recent study I seem to have missed!


3D Organoid Models Show Brain Mechanisms of Tourette Syndrome < Yale School of Medicine

Wow, that's something!

Thanks Chemar. I missed reading that also. I no longer check for news as much as I used to do and most of it for so long doesn't seem to me to advance towards some sort of relief.

It's very sad for me to say this but I remember when the TS Brain Bank started but now it's finally being used for research purposes and that's what it was set up to do.

Very small sample though. 5 TS patients and 11 controls.

Interesting about the severity, although I personally still think that the number and severity of comorbid conditions affects the severity of tics and that in treating the comorbid conditions adequately then we can lessen severity of tics. Bear in mind though that not everyone who has TS/tics will have comorbid conditions. I'm no scientist though.

I'm not sure what she means by “You’re doing something, and suddenly you feel compelled to clear your throat or say a word. It doesn’t pertain to the movement you’re doing, but it pops up involuntarily,” she says.

Those two sentences seem over simplified and unrealistic. It makes it sound as if you know you're going to have a particular tic as if it's some drawn out process. Sure, that feeling of compulsion can happen but it's not for all tics and not for all people.

It seems to me that research is going ahead at a snail's pace. Some people looking at the genes, some people looking at the Amygdala, others still fixated on the Basil Ganglia. We've always known haven't we that there's a problem with dysregulation of Dopamine. I wonder if there's mention of that in the full research article. quoting the news posted "For instance, future drugs may be able to compensate for the fewer interneurons in the basal ganglia of TS patients by making them more excitable."

Do they mean that because there are fewer interneurons, then that is the reason for the dysregulation of Dopamine??

What's important to me is what to do in the meantime. Education is the key.

I'll look for the full article. There's an abstract in Nature, but it could be full elsewhere for free. p.s I had trouble understanding the abstract. ugh.

I'm really just thinking out loud here and I came to the conclusion many years ago that there are so many variations of Tourette Syndrome that it would ever be possible to find a single cause.

Educate! Do no harm!