BackgroundIt has been proposed that tics and premonitory urges in primary tic disorders (PTD), like Tourette syndrome, are a manifestation of sensorimotor noise. However, patients with tics show no obvious movement imprecision in everyday life. One reason could be that patients have strategies to compensate for noise that disrupts performance (ie, noise that is task‐relevant).ObjectivesOur goal was to unmask effects of elevated sensorimotor noise on the variability of voluntary movements in patients with PTD.MethodsWe tested 30 adult patients with PTD (23 male) and 30 matched controls in a reaching task designed to unmask latent noise. Subjects reached to targets whose shape allowed for variability either in movement direction or extent. This enabled us to decompose variability into task‐relevant versus less task‐relevant components, where the latter should be less affected by compensatory strategies than the former. In alternating blocks, the task‐relevant target dimension switched, allowing us to explore the temporal dynamics with which participants adjusted movement variability to changes in task demands.ResultsBoth groups accurately reached to targets, and adjusted movement precision based on target shape. However, when task‐relevant dimensions of the target changed, patients initially produced movements that were more variable than controls, before regaining precision after several reaches. This effect persisted across repeated changes in the task‐relevant dimension across the experiment, and therefore did not reflect an effect of novelty, or differences in learning.ConclusionsOur results suggest that patients with PTD generate noisier voluntary movements compared with controls, but rapidly compensate according to current task demands. © 2024 The Authors. Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

中文翻译：

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原发性抽动障碍成人嘈杂自主运动的快速补偿

背景有人提出，原发性抽动障碍（PTD）（如图雷特综合征）中的抽动和先兆冲动是感觉运动噪声的表现。然而，抽动患者在日常生活中并没有表现出明显的运动不精确。原因之一可能是患者有策略来补偿干扰表现的噪音（即与任务相关的噪音）。目标我们的目标是揭示感觉运动噪音升高对 PTD 患者随意运动变异性的影响。方法我们测试了 30患有 PTD 的成年患者（23 名男性）和 30 名匹配的对照者参与一项旨在揭示潜在噪音的任务。受试者到达的目标的形状允许移动方向或范围的变化。这使我们能够将变异性分解为与任务相关的部分和与任务不太相关的部分，其中后者受到补偿策略的影响应该比前者小。在交替的块中，与任务相关的目标维度发生切换，使我们能够探索参与者根据任务需求的变化调整运动可变性的时间动态。结果两组都准确地达到了目标，并根据目标形状调整了运动精度。然而，当目标的与任务相关的尺寸发生变化时，患者最初产生的运动比对照组更具变化性，然后在几次到达后恢复精确度。这种效应在整个实验中任务相关维度的重复变化中持续存在，因此并没有反映出新颖性的影响或学习方面的差异。结论我们的结果表明，与对照组相比，PTD 患者产生更嘈杂的随意运动，但根据快速补偿以满足当前的任务要求。 © 2024 作者。运动障碍由 Wiley periodicals LLC 代表国际帕金森和运动障碍协会出版。