Evaluation of New Instruments for Screening and Diagnosis of Tics and Tic Disorders in a Well-Characterized Sample of Youth with Tics and Recruited Controls

ABSTRACT

Tics and tic disorders can significantly impact children, but limited screening tools and diagnostic challenges may delay access to care. The current study attempted to address these gaps by evaluating sensitivity and specificity of the Motor or Vocal Inventory of Tics (MOVeIT), a tic symptom screener, and the Description of Tic Symptoms (DoTS), a brief diagnostic assessment for tic disorders. Children (n = 100, age 6–17 years old) with tic disorders attending a Tourette specialty clinic and a community-recruited sample without tics completed a gold-standard assessment by a tic expert; these evaluations were compared to child self-report and parent and teacher report versions of the MOVeIT, and child and parent versions of the DoTS. The parent and child MOVeIT met or exceeded pre-specified 85% sensitivity and specificity criteria for detecting the presence of tics when compared to a gold-standard tic expert diagnosis. The Teacher MOVeIT had lower sensitivity (71.4%) but good specificity (95.7%) for identifying any tic symptoms compared to gold standard. For determination of the presence or absence of any tic disorder, sensitivity of both parent and child DoTS was 100%; specificity of the parent DoTS was 92.7% and child DoTS specificity was 75.9%. More work may be needed to refine the teacher MOVeIT, but it is also recognized that tic expression may vary by setting. While the MOVeIT and DoTS parent and child questionnaires demonstrated adequate sensitivity and specificity for determining the presence of tics and tic disorders in this well-defined sample, additional testing in a general population is warranted.

Acknowledgments

We thank the children, their parents, and teachers for participation in this study. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of: (1) Clinical Assessors: Kristina Borneman, Meenal Goyal, Sarah Scaccia, Zoey Shaw, Alexis Werner; (3) Students: Margaux Masten, Maria Yidi. For assistance with recruitment we thank the Tourette Association of America (TAA) - Greater Rochester and the Finger Lakes chapter, the TAA Greater New York State chapter, and the Greater Rochester Practice-Based Research Network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23794925.2023.2178040

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Disability Research and Dissemination Center (DRDC) cooperative agreement U01DD001007, which was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr Mink received salary support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development IDDRC grant P50HD103536 for preparation of the manuscript.