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New meta-study finds results of brain scanning studies reflect diversity of people with Tourette Syndrome and their symptoms

Posted on 30 October 2017

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Although research on Tourette Syndrome lags behind investigations of other neurological conditions, there are now several published fMRI studies on the condition, which examine how brain activity is altered in people with tics. To find out how the evidence from these different studies stack up, we conducted a ‘meta-analysis’ of previously published fMRI brain scanning studies on Tourette Syndrome.

 

A ‘meta-analysis’ uses specialised statistical techniques to pool together the results from many individual published studies. We predicted that we would see evidence across the papers from other research teams for changes in activity in movement regions of the brain in Tourette Syndrome. However, we were very surprised to see that not only was there evidence for altered activity in movement regions, there was additional evidence for much more widespread alterations, across many regions of the brain.

 

We think that this may represent the diversity of individuals who have Tourette Syndrome and often widely varying symptom profiles, not just in tics, but also in cormorbid (accompanying) conditions, such as ADHD and OCD.

 

It was very interesting to see however that when it came to altered activity in regions that were specifically linked to tic severity, it was only movement planning areas of the brain that were identified. This suggests there are indeed quite specific changes in movement circuits of the brain that relate closely to tics, while other features of the condition may be driven by alterations in brain regions outside the core movement areas.

 

You can download the paper for free here, or you are welcome to email us for a copy (c.rae@bsms.ac.uk).

A short video by Brent Zillwood documenting his experience of participating in the research

 

Polyanska L, Critchley HD, Rae CL. (2017) Centrality of prefrontal and motor preparation cortices to Tourette Syndrome revealed by meta-analysis of task-based neuroimaging studies. Neuroimage: Clinical. 16:257-267.


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