The brains of chil­dren with neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­ders seems to exhibit signs of neu­ro­plas­tic changes, sug­gest­ing com­pen­satory mech­a­nisms for the dis­or­der. This result opens up the pos­si­bil­ity that brain train­ing may be use­ful to help these patients con­trol their symptoms.

The dis­or­der stud­ied was Tourette syn­drome (TS), which usu­ally become evi­dent in early child­hood or ado­les­cence before the age of 18 years.  The symp­toms are invol­un­tary move­ments (tics) as well as ver­bal tics or vocal­iza­tions.  These tics are fre­quent, repet­i­tive and rapid.  Most cases of TS are mild and peo­ple lead pro­duc­tive lives.

Par­tic­i­pants in the study (aver­age age of 14) per­formed a motor task with high lev­els of man­ual con­flict (they had to obey instruc­tions such as press a left key in response to an arrow point­ing to the right and vice-versa). Chil­dren with TS were much faster than con­trol chil­dren (with­out TS) in such a task. This sup­ports the idea that chil­dren with TS have more con­trol over motor activ­ity in gen­eral, due to the con­stant require­ment to sup­press their tics. Impor­tantly chil­dren with the low­est response times were also the chil­dren with the least severe tics, indi­cat­ing greater motor control.

Par­tic­i­pants also under­went brain imag­ing. The microstruc­ture of the white mat­ter  in the cor­pus cal­lo­sum and the for­ceps minor (or FM, a white mat­ter track that con­nects the lat­eral and medial areas of the pre­frontal cor­tex) was dif­fer­ent in the TS chil­dren com­pared to the con­trol chil­dren. The authors con­cluded that these changes most likely reflected a func­tional adap­ta­tion to TS.

Inter­est­ingly, brain activ­ity in an area of the right pre­frontal cor­tex where FM con­nects was greater in the TS group com­pared to con­trols when per­form­ing the motor task task. The activ­ity in this area was related to the response times in the task for the TS group but not for the controls.

In sum, white mat­ter microstruc­ture as well as activ­ity in the pre­frontal cor­tex strongly pre­dicted per­for­mance in the chil­dren with Tourette syn­drome but not controls.

These results pro­vide evi­dence for com­pen­satory neu­ro­log­i­cal reor­ga­ni­za­tion in chil­dren with Tourette syn­drome. This sug­gests  that brain train­ing may be an option for chil­dren suf­fer­ing from TS to help them reduce their symp­toms, i.e. con­trol their ticks.

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