co-morbidity of obsessive compulsive disorder and tourette syndrome

objectives: tourette syndrome is a disease with vocal and motor tics. this disorder is co-morbid with many psychiatric disorders, among which obsessive-compulsive disorder is the most common. methods: during a one-year period, 30 patients with tourette disorder were studied at an adolescent psychiatry referral clinic. it was an analytical-descriptive study. subjects were selected by convenience sampling. the control group was selected from students in tehran schools similar to the first group in terms of age and gender. k-sads questionnaire was used to examine the existence of obsessive-compulsive disorder in both groups. the results were analyzed with spss software. results: the apparent co-morbidity of obsessive-compulsive disorder and tourette syndrome was seen in this study, such that 53% of patients affected with it had obsessive-compulsive disorder. statistics obtained was higher compared to earlier data. although this co-morbidity was somewhat different in the two genders, it was not considered statistically significant (80% girls and 48% boys). discussion: more focus should be laid upon the co-morbidity between tourette and ocd. it is recommended to study patients with tourette syndromemore extensively in terms of co-morbidity with other psychiatric disorders, especially the obsessive-compulsive disorder.