Study Of Memory And Association Analysis Of Candidate Genes On Toutette's Syndrome

Tourette's Syndrome(TS) is a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder which its onset is about 4-12 years. The percent between male and famale is 3-9 : l.TS is a multiple,complex tic disorder of variable severity and 3% of TS patients suffer from phonic tics. TS patients usually have many psychological and behaviour problems. The medical explanation for TS is unknown.but the factors of genetics,psychobiochemistry,environment are important . The IQ of TS patients is normal.but affected individuals often display deficit of memory and attention.This study was mainly aimed at exploring the possible role of DRD2P and COMT genes in susceptibility of TS, investigating explicit memory and implicit memory, priming effects and attention characteristic of TS patients.We compared the difference of explicit memory and implicit memory between TS patients and healthy controls by task dissociation and extended process dissociation procedure; the difference of perceptual priming and semantic Priming between TS patients and healthy controls by indirect tests; the difference of attention ability between TS patients and healthy controls by paper-pencil exam. DRD2P and COMT genotyping were carried out using PCR followed by RFLP and statistical analysis of genotype frequencies between TS patients and healthy controls was performed using SPSS programme.We found that compared with healthy controls, the explicit memory of TS patients decreased significantly, but the implicit memory of TS patients didn't change notably; the perceptual priming of TS patients decreased significantly, but the semantic priming didn't decreased apparently; the attention ability of TS patients didn't decrease significantly; no significant difference was observed between TS patients and healthy controls for genotype or allele frequency of the DRD2P gene, but statistical difference was found for genotype or allele frequency of the COMT gene.Our conclusion: The explicit memory of TS patients is impaired, but the implicit memory is normal;The perceptual priming of TS patients is damaged, but the somantic priming is normal.They have ordinary attention ability. No significant association in polymorphism of DRD2P was found between the patients and controls,but significant association in polymorphism of COMT was found.The frequency of the Metl58 allele among TS patients is significantly low and the frequency of the Vall58 allele is high.The functional polymorphism in the region of COMT may affect the susceptibility to TS.