How many of your kids developed tics after taking stimulants?

[Kimberly8]

Originally Posted by index.html

My goodness, Kimberly, you had to go back pretty far to find this thread, but that's fine.

Prozac is not a stimulant medication although it is one of the more activating SSRI's. I haven't seen anything about its use being associated with the development of tics.
Did your daughter have any tics prior to the Zoloft? Could you describe a few of her tics?

My 13yo DS had multiple tics including vocal tics between the ages of about 6 & 11 to the extent that he had a Tourette's diagnosis. At that time, he had never had any psychotropic medication. Because he hasn't ticked in a couple of years, we are now very slowly and very cautiously trying stimulants.

Thanks for replying My daughter is on prozac (not zoloft) and she did have a few tics before then...but they have progressed and become more often as well. She growls (like a dog) yells fat cow for no apparant reason...does muscle contractions throughout her body repeatedly...does this thing with her eyes...a few others but not really noticable...she didnt have any tics untill she was diagnosed with ocd then put on a different anti depressant which we took her off almost immediatley because she got so sensitive about everything...but then her ocd really got outta control so now we are trying prozac....hmmmm just dont know, thanks so much for replying...means a lot.

[index.html]

What does her doc say? I think I would be asking about stopping the antidepressants if I were in your shoes.

Is he considering Catapress or Tenex for the tics?

[vrie]

My daughter does extremely well on a low dose of clonidine for her tics. tenex has also been mantioned. In her case, the tics are fairly easily controlled and are much less of an issue than the ADHD and OCD. OCD is very common in girls with the gene that causes Tourette's. ADHD also goes hand in hand with Tourette's. Although my daughter has a family history of TS, her biofather did not. Twenty years, he was told none of this was nor could be genetic. My daughter was first placed on stimulants 6 years ago and the research on tics was out there.

[vrie]

All I can say is that different stimulants affected my daughter's tics differently. Dexedrine was the worst and Adderal the best for her in respect to the tics. Ask about changing the stimulant formula or about adding something to control the tics. I took my daughter off stimulants for years (resulting in 4 different day cares etc for being kicked out of several) until I accepted that more than one pill (or one type of pill) was necessary.

[Jennita]

Originally Posted by Kimberly8

My daughter is 10 and diagnosed with OCD...she takes prozac and has developed tics..they want to add tourettes into diagnosis...is prozac a stimulant?????????????? is this the reason and its not tourettes??????????????????she has developed severe behavioral issues also....now I am really confused!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Prozac is not in the same class as "stimulants", I think those are basically dopamine drugs. However, what is over-looked by some is that serotonin, the neurotransmitter effected by the SSRi's, is one of our "excitatory" neurotransmitters, so yes, it makes sense the nervous system and brain are stimulated by those drugs although they are not the typical known stimulant drugs. If you download the PDF of most SSRi's, you can find alot of nervous system adverse effects are listed there..but look under "Other events observed in clinical trials" to get more details than the basic charts; you may have to also get to an online medical dictionary to determine what those are since they use medical terms to describe things, such as a word like akathisia, which is defined as:

1. <neurology> A condition of motor restlessness in which there is a feeling of muscular quivering, an urge to move about constantly and an inability to sit still, a common extrapyramidal side effect of neuroleptic drugs.

2. An inability to sit down because of intense anxiety at the thought of doing so.



So just because something isn't in a certain class of stimulants doesn't mean it doesn't stimulate the nervous system in an adverse way.