Tourette syndrome (TS), like many neurological diseases, has a genetic component. Although not hereditary, there is a genetic predisposition that increases the risk of a patient’s relatives developing the disease.
50% of monozygotic twins and around 8% of first-degree relatives show a concordance for this syndrome. However, the genes predisposing to the disease, which are probably numerous and interact, have not yet been identified, making molecular diagnosis impossible for the time being.
Environmental factors, notably immune reactions and exposure to toxic factors during development in utero and after birth, are also suspected. We are talking about a multifactorial syndrome.
At the Paris Brain Institute
Andreas HARTMANN, Yulia WORBE and Christel DEPIENNE, (Team “Mov’It: Movement, Investigations, Therapeutics. Normal and abnormal movement: pathophysiology and experimental therapeutics“, led by Profs VIDAILHET and LEHERICY, are members of the international Tourette syndrome genetics consortium.
An anonymous screening of the genome, i.e. a study of all the chromosomes in search of genes predisposing to the disease, carried out by the consortium in 2019 and involving 4,819 patients and 9,488 controls, has made it possible to identify numerous regions of the genome involved in the onset of Tourette syndrome and in particular in the appearance of tics.