(Around 50 per cent of those with Tourette’s are likely to pass it on to their children, according to one analysis.) “These girls who are presenting did not have a family history, so there’s something different about this cohort,” he says. His clinic has seen an increase in the number of referrals for teenage girls – unusual given Tourette’s usually affects boys, and usually presents at an early age of five or six, rather than 14 or 15.
Suggestibility could be one root cause, says Uttom Chowdhury, who works in an NHS community clinic focused on tics and Tourette’s in Bedfordshire. This is still just a theory – and it’s unclear what the mechanism for such a phenomenon might be, or how it would fit into our limited understanding of the causes of Tourette’s syndrome. (None of the authors of either BMJ paper responded to requests for comment.)
The physicians cautioned “there is some concern that social media and websites such as TikTok that promote the sharing of videos of influencers with symptoms may have a part to play." Others researching Tourette’s and tics responded, saying we could be seeing a 21st century equivalent of the Middle Ages’ “dancing mania”, when people began suffering from attacks of spontaneous dancing which has little cause.
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