Taking On Tourette's
A new approach to stopping tics before they happen offers hope to thousands who live with the disorder.
By Catharine Skipp and Arian Campo-Flores,
Newsweek, Sept. 3, 2007
Marg Mackrell was just 3 when her parents noticed the first signs of what turned out to be Tourette syndrome. The blond toddler began sniffing her fingers repeatedly, and over the next six years, her uncontrolled tics came to include clicking, whirring and scrunching her nose. Her condition was manageable (she attends school with other kids) until last year, when, at the age of 9, she began to suffer about 60 episodes a day of repeated head jerks that left her sore and spent by nighttime. So when MacKrell's parents learned about an old but little-used therapy called habit-reversal training (HRT), they decided to try it. Last November, Marg started learning new ways to pre-empt her most severe tics at the Child and Family Study Center at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. When she felt a head jerk coming on, she was taught to drop her head and stare at the second hand on her watch for a minute. "Soon [the head jerking] was down by 90 percent," says Marg's mother, Diane MacKrell. "I couldn't believe it."
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