Taking On Tourette's

Newsweek, September, 2007 by Catharine Skipp and Arian Campo-Flores

Marg MacKrell was just 3 when her parents noticed the first signs of what turned out to be Tourette syndrome. The blond toddler began sniffing her fingers repeatedly, and over the next six years, her uncontrolled tics came to include clicking, whirring and scrunching her nose. Her condition was manageable (she attends school with other kids) until last year, when, at the age of 9, she began to suffer about 60 episodes a day of repeated head jerks that left her sore and spent by nighttime. So when MacKrell's parents learned about an old but little-used therapy called habit-reversal training (HRT), they decided to try it. Last November, Marg started learning new ways to pre-empt her most severe tics at the Child and Family Study Center at Duke University Medical Center in Durham,...

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