Premonitory Urge in Patients with Tics and Functional Tic‐like Behaviors

BACKGROUND: Premonitory urges (PU) are well described in primary tics, but their frequency and intensity in functional tic-like behaviors (FTLB) are unclear. OBJECTIVE: To study the experience of PU in patients with FTLB. METHODS: We compared the results of the premonitory urge for tics scale (PUTS) in adults with tics and FTLB in the University of Calgary Adult Tic Registry. RESULTS: We included 83 patients with tics and 40 with FTLB. When comparing patients with tics, FTLB with tics and FTLB only, we did not detect significant differences either in the total PUTS score (P = 0.39), or in any of the individual PUTS item sub-scores (P values ranging between 0.11 and 0.99). CONCLUSIONS: Patients with FTLB report PU at similar frequency and intensity to patients with tics. This finding confirms that PU are not a useful feature to discriminate FTLB from tics.