Member Comments are provided by individuals and reflect their personal opinions only. Under NO circumstances should you act on any advice or opinion posted in this forum. ALWAYS check with your personal physician before taking any action regarding your health! MedHelp International and our partners, sponsors and affiliates have no obligation to monitor any comments posted on this site, or the content and/or accuracy of such exchanges. MedHelp International does not endorse the views of any user.
Tourette Syndrome Community
This is a patient support community for discussion relating to Tourette syndryome.
Abhijeet Deshmukh, MD
by gothic, Mar 18, 2008 04:59PM
is there a medication i can take for my tourettes i sniff well its really a squinch of my nose and i breath really fast and hard out my nose at the same time and it gives me really bad head aches all the time i "sniff" atleast 100 to 200 times an hour some times less sometimes more my doc said that the med could give me more severe tics but i cant deal with it any more its driving me nuts can you help me there has to be something
Post Comment
We need to consider two aspects to your Tourette's syndrome. First, the primary symptoms of repetitive sniffing and breathing symptoms and the additional symptoms of headaches.
When the primary symptom is the predominant, medicines do help a lot. The breathing symptoms that you have are probably more problematic than the headaches.
The typical and atypical neuroleptic medication helps in such conditions. But they have their own set of side effects which can be really troublesome. Then we think of some alternative treatments. Behavior therapy is helpful to cope up with the social and psychological effects of the tics.
There is one more class of drugs which can help; the antihypertensive drugs. Specifically Catapres (Clonidine) is effective, and it has lesser side effects than the neuroleptics. But you have to keeps a watch on your blood pressure. Catapress causes the blood pressure to fall.
The other aspect I was talking about was regarding any co-existing conditions. Quite often, obsessive thought and/or compulsive behaviors are associated with the tics. In such cases, Clomipramine is a god alternative. It helps the obsessive part of the symptoms. I don't say Tics are obsessions, but having obsessive compulsive traits makes it difficult to treat the tics with usual medication.
Do you have any of these?
I hope I could throw some light. Please ask any more queries you may have.
Regards
Prozac will not help for the OCD. It is only an antidepressant. I suspect the depression has come after the OCD. In most cases, the depression in OCD is a reactive depression. You treat the OCD effectively and you have treated the depression.
Fluvoxamine is a good option for you to consider for the OCD. It is recommended for co-existent OCD and Trourette's syndrome. Addition of a dopamine antagonist (Neuroleptic) helps. Pimozide has been found beneficial when taken with Fluvoxamine.
Regards