Hi, I am an 18 year old male and I was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome at age 6. First off I would like to say that although my condition was not triggered from flashing lights I was very similar to your daughter at her age. And I am sure that you will be happy to hear that I am no longer on any medication and my touretts are very mild today and are extremely manageable. I had been on a few different medications for my touretts over the years but decided to go off of them for college and am doing totally fine. I do not know if your considering medication but when i was initially diagnosed they put me on medication that was pretty intense and did a good job of taking ticks away but however it did made me drowsy and I had to have regular ekg's to check up on my health. But I found the best medicine I ever took was called Guanficene sp? and that did not have any side affects. It did not completely take away my ticks but it brought them down to a much more manageable level.
I can say that my ticks got much worse during puberty. My ticks are usually absent when I am concentrating on something such as driving a car or running a race. But they spike whenever I get emotional (sad, happy, angry etc) I would say the worst year for me was probably my sophmore year of high school. I am a pretty serious track athlete and was even having trouble doing workouts because I would do these ab flexing ticks that were just plain annoying. So that year I went off of the guanficene and started more powerfull medication (I can't remember the name sorry) but I was only on that for a year before going back to guanficene. Most of my friends at school didn't know I had touretts and I became pretty good at just shrugging off comments. In all of school they never we bad enough that it became a serious. But by my senior year I had pretty much grown out of the bad stages and gotten to a point where they were better than they were when I was a kid. I think what I am trying to say is that even though its a shocking thing to learn that your child has a syndrome that \she will have for the rest of their lives if her case is anything like mine she will be totally fine.
Matt
