(Medical Xpress)—Like narcolopsy, Tourettes syndrome is as much an enigma to the neuroscientists that study it, as it is to its sufferers. To say that we really understand nothing about how diseases like Tourettes actually work, is to face reality. Yet the standard method of scientific inquiry has finally begun to give us some substantive clues—recently in narcolepsy, and now also in Tourettes. Using an animal model of the disease, researchers have found that one way, among many, to cause the disease, is to create a deficiency of the enzyme histidine decarboxylase (Hdc). Their new findings, just published in Cell, also suggest similar mechanisms may operate in human disease.
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