

Garbled Texting Reveals Woman's Stroke


The message read: "every where thinging days nighing," her text read. "Some is where!" The woman's husband knew she kept her autocorrect off, so something else was up, ABC Newsreported.


The event was reported online Dec. 25 in the Archives of Neurologyby doctors from Harvard School of Medicine. The doctors refer to the woman's condition as "dystextia," a termed coined in an earlier case.

The condition appears to be a new type of aphasia, which is trouble processing written or spoken information. "As the accessibility of electronic communication continues to advance, the growing digital record will likely become an increasingly important means of identifying neurologic disease, particularly in patient populations that rely more heavily on written rather than spoken communication," the doctors wrote.

Although jumbled text messages are common Dr. Larry Goldstein, a neurologist and director of the stroke center at Duke University, told ABCthat, "It would have been very easy to dismiss because of the normal problems with texting, but this was a whole conversation that wasn't making sense. I might be concerned about a patient based on a text like this if they were telling me they hadn't intended to send a disjointed jumble but they weren't able to correct themselves."

