Digital gibberish may not always be something to LOL about.
A new study by doctors at Boston’s Harvard Medical School shows that nonsensical text messages could signal the early onset of strokes. And the name for the strange symptom? “Dystexia.”
The very modern phenomenon was discovered when a “healthy 25-year-old right-handed pregnant woman” was texting her husband from her obstetrician’s office, according to in an article published by the doctors in the journal Archives of Neurology, t
itled “Acute Stroke in the Modern Age.”
The text messages, according to Medical Daily, went like this:
“Husband: So what's the deal?
Wife: Every where thinging days nighing
Wife: Some is where!
Husband: What the hell does that mean?
Husband: You're not making any sense.”
Soon after, the husband met up with his wife and immediately took her to an emergency room. There, a series of tests showed the young woman to have several signs of a stroke, including difficulty using the right side of her body and disorientation. Because she had lost her voice due to a cold, her speech wasn’t affected as it usually might have been during a stroke — the unintelligible text messages were the first signs of the malady.
An MRI scan revealed that part of the woman’s brain involved with language had been cut short of blood flow and was damaged. She was given a low dose of blood-thinning medication and was sent home.
In the case study, the doctors wrote, "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."
Very few women aged 15 to 34 experienced strokes last year, only about 11,000, according to most recent reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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