Alison Hammond has revealed that her son used to have a tic that they “never discussed”.
She opened up about her teenage son Aiden Hammond’s tic during an interview with Scarlett Moffatt on ITV’s This Morning on Tuesday (19 July).
Moffatt is hosting a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Tourette’s Mystery: Scarlett Moffatt Investigates, which will air tonight.
The show explores a rise in tics among teenagers and uncovering the potential causes.
During the interview, Hammond’s co-host Dermot O’Leary pointed towards statistics that show childhood tics typically appear in children between five to seven-years-old.
He added that boys are more likely to be affected at a ratio of four to one.
O’Leary asked: “A lot of people grow out of them, do they?”
The question prompted Hammond to recall Aiden’s childhood tic.
“My son had a tic, a little tic, and I just ignored it and we never discussed it,” she said.
“And then I just noticed as he got older, it just went. I was like a facial tic, like you,” she added, referring to Moffatt.
“He used to just turn his head to the side.”
Moffatt, 31, said that she had facial tics at the age of 11 that focused around her eyes, but they disappeared on their own.
Tics are the main symptom of Tourette’s syndrome, which causes a person to make involuntary sounds and movements.
According to the NHS, some examples of physical tics can include blinking, eye rolling, grimacing, shoulder shrugging, jumping, and touching things or people.
Vocal tics include grunting, throat clearing, whistling, coughing, tongue clicking, or saying random words, phrases and swear words.
Elsewhere in the programme, the Gogglebox star shared that it was “scary” not understanding what she was going through when she developed tics.
“It was the late nineties, early noughties when I developed it and the only sort of Tourette’s that had been in the media at that point was the swearing attacks that we know,” Moffatt said.
“When I went to the doctors with this and other ailments, my mum and dad didn’t really quite understand what was going on. I remember that being quite a scary time not being able to control my own body.”
