Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007. They have found signs of the disease in their 90s books

In 2007, Terry Pratchett approached Rob Wilkins, his assistant, and told him that the ‘s’ of his keyboard had disappeared. He was laughing. I thought it was a joke, an innocent. “What the hell have you done with her?” He asked.

But the ‘S’ was still in the same usual place: on the keyboard.

After a few months of testing, the writer knew that the only place where the ‘S’ was disappeared was his head. Postterio cortical atrophy sufferedA, a neurodegenerative disorder typically related to Alzheimer’s, which causes problems to see, to process information, to read, speak and write. He died in 2015 In a small town west of Salisbury.

When does dementia begin? That basically is The question asked Thom Wilcockson and his team from the University of Laughborough. Pratchett’s case was very interesting because posterior cortical atrophy has an impact on the use of language and this man wrote a lot. So Wilcockson’s team He examined 33 Books of World Disco (29 published before 2007 and four later) to see if there was any point where the first symptoms of the disease could be identified.

And it seems that. Among the first books and the last, the researchers discovered a significant decrease of number of nouns, verbs and adjectives. In addition, they found that the number of phrases increased (something that, according to researchers, fits a tendency towards simpler language).

The funny thing is that the turning point was not 2007, but 1998. In that year, Pratchett published ‘The country of the end of the world‘And it is the work in which the change in trend begins to become evident. “This demonstrates a long preclinical period of dementia and the subtle deficiencies that are not always detected with traditional cognitive evidence,” Wilcockson explained.

It is not the first time that the equipment uses this type of analysis. They have done it with Iris Murdoch (who also died of Alzheimer’s) and with Agatha Christie (we suspect he suffered). However, not everyone is sane with researchers. Not because they believe they are wrong, but because there are many more factors to consider. In New Scientistfor example, Rob Wilkins explained that in recent years Terry began to have a much more intense “professional life” and that prevented reviewing novels as thoroughly as previously.

Be that as it may, the investigation is fascinating. Especially now, at a time when we write (and do audios) much more often than ever. Algorithms like these could dive in our emails, our WhatsApp conversations and in our social networks to identify signs of problems many years before they become evident.

Image | Solarisgirl | David Skinner

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