20/11/2004
On another page on this site I confidently stated that
alcohol consumption reduced tics. Common sense would suggest this.
Now I don't drink very often any more, because of my medications, but I had occasion to
last night. And this time I watched myself.
It's strange, but the tics actually got worse!
8/1/2005
Since my first request for information I have been completely under whelmed with answers to the alcohol question. This is, I suppose, partly to do with the small number of TS adults, partly to do with the poor placing of this site in search engines, and partly because people are indifferent to it. However I have received one reply: and it's a good one!
KS wrote to me and said:
I can immediately sympathise with this; for quite a while I had an alcohol problem. Not very strangely, it was during the worst period of my depression and anxiety. Funny how it's so much easier to meet new people at a party when you're wasted.
I thought, in order to hopefully coax some more information out of people, I'd explain why alcohol should make tics better.
Remember this diagram?
We are looking at the ends of two neurons (brain cells) where they almost touch. But because they don't touch, the messages that pass down the neurons need some way to "jump" the gap between them. They do that by releasing chemicals which cross the gap, and are absorbed by the other one. If you've read the Chemistry page of this site you'd know that dopamine is one of these chemicals, and that TSers have problems with dopamine. To simplify it a lot, we have too much dopamine.
Now, TS drugs work by blocking the passage of dopamine by
doing this:
They block the receptors, which is where the dopamine is collected by the receiving neuron.
The reason we expect alcohol to work like a TS drug is that
we know that alcohol does this:
It creates a barrier that prevents the neurochemicals in the brain from passing through: therefore less is collected by the receptors.
It appears that the signals that are blocked by alcohol the quickest are the impulse control ones (sort of the little version of yourself that sits on your shoulder and says "Do you really want to do that?"). This is why you get more confident/assertive/restless/aggressive/foolhardy when you drink.
Now Dr Comings believed that TS is an impulse control disorder; so logically anything that lessens impulse control would make tics stronger.
Both are good arguments, but I'd rather get some opinions on the matter before I support one or the other.
Obviously, all the Children out there with TS can't participate. But if you are over the legal age I would love to hear from you. No need to get drunk just to test it, but next time you have a glass of wine, think about what it's doing to your tics.
Please click here to email me about this.