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Published on: December 2, 2015
The Premonitory Urge to Tic in Children and Adolescents: Measuring, Describing, and Correlating
Liping Yu1, Yanlin Li2, Hanxue Yang3
1Department of Psychiatry, Beijing Children's Hospital, Capital Medical University, National Center for Children's Health, Beijing, China.
Insights
Premonitory urges (PUs) in children with tic disorders (TDs) are linked to age, tic severity, and impairments. Understanding these urges is key for developing effective treatments for TD.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Pediatric Neurology
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Tic disorders (TDs) significantly impact children's lives.
- Premonitory urges (PUs) are a key feature of TDs, but their characteristics in children require further exploration.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the premonitory urges (PUs) in children diagnosed with tic disorders (TDs).
- To describe the nature of PUs and correlate them with demographic factors, tic severity, and comorbidities.
Main Methods:
- Recruitment of first-episode, drug-naive patients with TDs.
- Utilized the Premonitory Urge for Tics Scale (PUTS) to quantify PU severity.
- Employed regression analysis to identify predictors of PUs.
Main Results:
- Age, motor tic severity, vocal tic severity, and tic-related impairments were significant predictors of PUs.
- The study identified specific factors associated with the intensity of premonitory urges in pediatric TD patients.
Conclusions:
- This research offers valuable insights into the premonitory urges experienced by children with TD.
- Further studies should examine PUs across diverse age groups and inform the development of targeted interventions for tic reduction.
Background:
This study aimed to explore the premonitory urges (PUs) experienced by children with tic disorders (TDs), with the aim of describing and correlating these urges with various factors.
Methods:
First-episode and drug-naive patients with TDs were recruited. We conducted a comprehensive study utilizing the Premonitory Urge for Tics Scale to measure the severity of PUs. Regression analysis was performed to explore the relationships between PUs and other relevant factors, such as demographic characteristics, tic severity, and comorbidities.
Results:
The linear regression model revealed that age (β = 0.090, P = 0.004), the severity of motor tics (β = 0.112, P < 0.001), the severity of vocal tics (β = 0.074, P = 0.020), and the severity of tic-related impairments (β = 0.112, P = 0.001) were significant predictors of PUs.
Conclusions:
This study provides insights into the nature of PUs in children with TD. Future research should focus on PUs across different age groups and develop and evaluate targeted treatments that aim to reduce the severity of tics.
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