Another study links tics to social media as researchers find more time scrolling on apps could make them worse

• Doctors have reported an influx of teen patients with tics, or involuntary movements or vocalizations, since 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• A recent, small study considered young adults who had tics before the pandemic, and whether they got worse.

A small study of teens and tweens found an association between time spent on social media and severity of tics, according to preliminary results released Monday.

Tics are compulsive, often repetitive sounds or movements that typically start in childhood and result in a diagnosis of a chronic tic disorder, such as Tourette syndrome. They can range from head twitches to grunts and clicks, or more rarely cases of inappropriate or obscene outbursts.

A sudden wave of new tic cases in teens since the start of the pandemic has puzzled scientists around the world, prompting medical journal articles and research. The latest effort to understand the increasing prevalence of tics looked to social media for answers.

"Given the known increases in social media use during the pandemic, as well as the parallel increase in tic disorders that we have seen in our clinic, we investigated whether there was any correlation between social media use and tic symptoms," study author Jessica Frey, a movement disorders specialist at the University of Florida, said in a press release.

Teens who had tics before the pandemic said they got worse

In the study, 20 young adults between the ages of 11 and 21 completed a survey of their time spent on social media, frequency and severity of tics, and overall quality of life.

The vast majority (90%) of participants said they used social media more during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 85% indicated that their tics also grew more frequent over those years.

Half of the teens surveyed said that social media had negatively impacted their tics, according to the press release. Researchers reported a significant link between increased tic severity, greater social media use, and reduced quality of life; however, they did not find a link between social media use and frequency of tics.

The study results will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's Annual Meeting in April. In the meantime, researchers plan to enroll 60 more participants and explore the association further.

Past studies found a curious prevalence of tics in teen girls

Although there's no large-scale effort to track tic cases nationally, specialists across the US have reported similar trends: an influx of new patients with tics, many of them teen girls.

Chronic tic disorders like Tourette's mostly affect boys, and many of those boys begin showing symptoms as early as 6 or 7 years old, according to Mayo Clinic.

A Wall Street Journal article published in October described influxes of new, primarily female teenage patients with tics across the country, from Texas Children's Hospital to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Around the same time, researchers in the UK published a report detailing a surge of adolescent girls showing "complex and bizarre" tics.

As many of the girls reported using TikTok, researchers have considered how social media might drive such an unusual and wide-reaching trend. Some of the new patients said they spent time watching videos of influencers who reported having Tourette syndrome or other tic disorders, WSJ reported.

But the mental toll of the pandemic cannot be underestimated. People with tic disorders often manage other mental health conditions, like anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to the International Parkinson and Movement Disorders Society. Experts also have pointed to a rising prevalence of anxiety and depression in kids and teens during the pandemic, which could be another driving factor.