The Twitching Generation

February 28, 2022

(The Atlantic) – Müller-Vahl, a professor of psychiatry at Hannover Medical School and the chair of the European Society for the Study of Tourette Syndrome, was not the only one puzzled by this phenomenon. The global community of Tourette’s researchers is tight-knit, and as they talked it became clear that a shift in patients and symptoms was happening all over the world, at the same time. Before the pandemic, 2 to 3 percent of pediatric patients at the Johns Hopkins University Tourette’s Center, in Baltimore, had acute-onset tic-like behaviors, but that rose last year to 10 to 20 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal. Texas Children’s Hospital reported seeing approximately 60 teenagers with sudden tics between March 2020 and the autumn of 2021, compared with just one or two a year before that. (Read More)