Chronic tic in kids affects the family
22 Mar 2020
Developmental disabilities like ASD and ADHD affect children’s academic performance; and more importantly, the relationship with their family members.Chronic tic disorders in children worsen family functioning and may lower individual and parent quality of life (QoL), a new study has found.
Pooling the data of two cross-sectional analyses, researchers looked at the impact of chronic tic disorders on QoL and on the family―using the Child Health Questionnaire-Parent Form 50 (CHQ-PF50) and PedsQL Family Impact Module (PedsQL FIM), respectively―on 205 youths. Tic symptom severity was assessed using the Yal Gloval Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS). A hundred community controls were also included.
Parent proxy-reported physical and psychosocial QoL scores were significantly lower in children with tic disorders than in community controls, as was clinician-rated global function (p<0.0001 for all). The same was true for psychosocial QoL in those with chronic tics in the presence of obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Multiple regression analyses, however, found that tic severity was not a significant predictor of neither physical (β, –0.08; p=0.59) nor psychosocial (β, 0.04; p=0.76) QoL.
Parents of kids with tic disorders reported significantly worse overall family impact (p<0.0001) and psychological QoL (p=0.01). Families of children with Tourette’s Syndrome had significantly worse function (p=0.007). Multiple regression analysis likewise showed that tic severity was not an independent predictor of family impact and parent QoL.
“[I]t is possible that we did not detect a relationship between tic severity and child QoL because tics wax and wane over time, and the timeframes for the assessment tools differed,” said the researchers.