{"doi":"10.31219/osf.io/bv86n","title":"Tic prevalence by direct observation in an elementary school","abstract":"Objective: Tics fluctuate over time, and children and parents often do not identify mild tics. Most tic prevalence studies are cross-sectional and report tics in around 20% of young children. However, a tic study that observed classrooms on 8 monthly visits found motor tics in 47% of all first graders. Single assessments may underestimate the prevalence of tic disorders in the general primary school population. Method: Participants were 215 children in kindergarten through fifth grade, half in first grade. Trained raters visited the classroom monthly for three consecutive months, observing each child for at least three minutes. Results: Tics were observed on at least one visit in 49% of children. Peak point prevalence was 35.1% for motor tics and 4.9% for phonic tics. Simple tics were more common than complex tics. Tic frequency increased with age. The most common anatomic locations for tics were mouth, extremity, and eye. Since tics occurred in all grades, 50-60% of children must have tics at some point by fifth grade. Conclusion: Tics lasting for a year or more, but not identified as tics by the child or parent, are likely much more common than most epidemiological surveys would suggest. These results largely confirm the results of Snider et al. (2002) and extend them to phonic tics. Both studies suggest that tics occur in most children, and chronic tics occur in more than a quarter of children, at some point during elementary school years.","journal":"OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints)","year":2022,"id":302149,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.7973,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":993700,"name":"Ann Iverson","orcid":"0000-0001-8844-7752","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":994129,"name":"Samantha Ranck","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":993701,"name":"Sarah Grossen","orcid":"0009-0000-2738-5009","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":831685,"name":"Jimin Ding","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":244881,"name":"Deanna J. Greene","orcid":"0000-0002-0739-7771","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":413145,"name":"Kevin J. Black","orcid":"0000-0002-6921-9567","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":414669,"name":"Emily C. Bihun","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":19,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:32:06.309890Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}