How does Tourette syndrome impact adolescents’ daily living? A text mining study

Abstract

Tourette syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disease in which clinical manifestations are essentially present during childhood and adolescence, corresponding to one of the critical development phases. However, its consequences on the daily lives of young patients have been insufficiently investigated. Here, we aimed to investigate this using a statistical text mining approach, allowing for the analysis of a large volume of free textual data. Sixty-two adolescents with Tourette syndrome participated in an interview in which they discussed their daily life (i) in school, (ii) at home, and (iii) with strangers, (iv) the aspect of Tourette syndrome which caused the most difficulty, and (v) their thoughts regarding their future as adults. Following data pre-processing, these corpora were analyzed separately using the IRAMUTEQ software through factorial correspondence analysis to identify the most commonly recurring topics of each corpus, and their relations with clinical features. The main difficulty corpus was directly related to comorbidities of Tourette syndrome. Daily life at home was correlated with executive functioning. Difficulties at school were related to a higher severity of tics. Thoughts regarding future daily life were worst for the youngest patients and were correlated with executive functioning and a higher depression score. Taken altogether, our results highlighted that social stigma was a pervasive topic among our corpora. From a clinical standpoint, tic severity was especially related to difficulties at school, while comorbidities had a high impact on social daily living and cost for managing both tics and symptoms of comorbidities. Trial registration clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04179435.

Applying an Established Exposure Response Prevention Protocol for Young People With Tourette Syndrome in an Intensive, Group Format: A Feasibility Study

“…While impairment and most QoL scores did not improve significantly as a result of the group, this may be due to the complexity of the group recruited. The population of children recruited had high levels of co-occurring conditions alongside tics, which are commonly described as more impactful on QoL than tics themselves (Atkinson-Clement et al, 2022) and may have impacted impairment ratings. Although the samples were too small to test for statistical difference, on visual inspection of the data, the first group appeared to have better outcomes (see Figures S1 and S3 in supplementary materials).…”

Tourette syndrome research highlights from 2022

“…Another study investigated how adults with TS make decisions in two different contexts ( Atkinson-Clement et al 2022a ): one involving choices between two options under ambiguity (i.e., when the probabilities of outcomes for each option are not fully known), and the other under risk (i.e., when the probabilities of outcomes are known, but there is a possibility of loss). This study was primarily motivated by the observation that individuals with TS are more prone to engaging in risky behaviors in their everyday lives.…”

Comparison of Impressions of COVID-19 Vaccinations Stratified by the Number of Vaccinations Among Japanese Healthcare Professional University Students

“…Previous studies examined impressions of various diseases using a text mining analysis [ 12 - 16 ]. Okuhara et al evaluated changes in impressions of HPV vaccinations in newspaper text using a cluster analysis and correspondence analysis and found a marked change in keywords over time [ 13 ].…”

“…Relationships were observed between negative elements in daily life and keywords such as “Itch,” “Pain,” and “Embarrassment” [ 15 ]. Atkinson-Clement et al found that the severity of tics and “Comorbidities” affected the daily social life of patients with Tourette syndrome using a correspondence analysis [ 16 ]. These studies performed a text mining analysis, to identify specific words and relationships among these words from a different viewpoint to a conventional qualitative analysis.…”

“…Previous studies examined impressions of COVID-19 vaccinations mostly using a quantitative method [ 9 - 11 ]. The text mining method, a qualitative method, has been employed to investigate impressions of a number of diseases, including, human papillomavirus [ 12 , 13 ], depression [ 14 ], atopic dermatitis [ 15 ], and many others [ 16 ]. A text mining analysis is a method of analyzing text, among other qualitative data, and is being actively examined in the field of information science [ 17 ].…”