Habit Learning Impaired in Tourette Syndrome

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Children and adults afflicted with the tic-causing disease known as Tourette syndrome have a harder time with tasks requiring habit learning, report investigators publishing in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry.

The finding could lead to an animal model of the disease that researchers could use to study the areas of the brain affected by TS and to come up with new medications aimed at treating its symptoms.

The study was carried out among 56 children and adults with TS and 67 healthy children and adults who served as the study controls. All were given a standard test designed to measure people’s ability to learning through habit. Participants also took tests to see how well they learned through declarative memory functioning, which includes memorization of facts, words and experiences.

Results show people with TS had a significantly harder time learning with the habit test than the healthy controls, and learning ability decreased with the severity of TS symptoms. Conversely, TS participants scored about the same as healthy controls on tests that measure the ability to learn via declarative memory functioning.

The researchers believe further study of habit learning in animal models of TS offers “the exciting promise not only of improving our knowledge of the neurobiological origins of TS but also of developing novel therapeutics through bona fide translational research programs and methods that are not available to human clinical studies alone.”

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SOURCE: Archives of General Psychiatry, 2004;61:1259-1268