I'm sure there are prevalence studies over time, though I don't know what they say.
Personally, I'd be very hesitant to judge anybody with it to be faking, though. The price of guessing wrong when someone does have it seems a lot worse than guessing wrong when they don't.
I remember a story where a father happened to notice his son ticcing and such alone in his room. The father felt incredibly guilty as he'd been punishing his son for it (the son was eventually diagnosed with TS).
From Wikipedia:
Quote:
The first presentation of Tourette syndrome is thought to be in a 1489 book, Malleus maleficarum ("Witch's hammer") by Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, describing a priest whose tics were "believed to be related to possession by the devil".[78] A French doctor, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, reported the first case of Tourette syndrome in 1825,[79] describing Marquise de Dampierre, an important woman of nobility in her time.[12] Jean-Martin Charcot, an influential French physician, assigned his resident Georges Albert Édouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette, a French physician and neurologist, to study patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital, with the goal of defining an illness distinct from hysteria and from chorea.[25]
In 1885, Gilles de la Tourette published an account of nine patients, Study of a Nervous Affliction, concluding that a new clinical category should be defined.[80] The eponym was later bestowed by Charcot after and on behalf of Gilles de la Tourette.[25][81]
No mass media (except newpapers?) in 1885, so one could compare the prevalence back then to now.