Relationship between Tourette's disorder and anxiety in children

This study examined whether children and adolescents with Tourette's disorder (TD) experience greater chronic and/or social anxiety than children and adolescents without this diagnosis. The design also included an anxiety- induction task, and we hypothesized that the TD group would report greater increases in physiological arousal (i.e., heart rate) and state anxiety in response to this task when compared to the control group. Results indicated that the TD group did, in fact, report greater levels of both general and social anxiety than the control group. Analyses also indicated that the TD group did experience greater state anxiety both pretask and posttask and that they experienced greater levels of physiological arousal as compared to the control group. However, the increases in arousal and state anxiety experienced by children with TD were not significantly higher than the increases for children without this diagnosis. Group differences were also evident on several subscales of the Child Behavior Checklist. The results provide useful information concerning the anxiety experienced by individuals with TD and suggest that assessment and treatment of TD may need to account for anxiety associated with the disorder.