Jumbled text messages could be the sign of a stroke

Very often, it is easy to attribute partially garbled text messages to a tragic failure of your smartphone’s spelling correction feature. It happens enough that there are sites dedicated to the funny things that can happen when it goes really bad.

Leave it to technology to being able to provide a gauge of activity without any dedicated apps, like your health. A man who lives in the Boston area received two confusing texts from his pregnant wife. The first one said, “every where thinging days nighing” and the second one said, “Some is where!” Is that possible to create with autocorrect or word prediction? Maybe, but the man’s 25 year old wife had her autocorrect turned off. He rushed her to the emergency room and doctors were able to determine, in conjunction with other symptoms of confusion and poor motor coordination, that she was having a stroke. An MRI confirmed the diagnosis, the woman was treated and made a full recovery.

Three Harvard Medical School doctors have coined a word for the condition: “dystextia.” The case of the pregnant stroke victim was published in the Archives of Neurology, citing that “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.”

Now, before you start dialing 911, 999, 112 or whatever the emergency numbers are in your locale, the medical community obviously wants to point out that using “dystextia” alone as a means for detecting a stroke would produce a monumental amount of “false positives.” Of course other factors must be considered. Disorientation and inability to communicate on multiple levels, not just texting, need to be taken into account along with other symptoms, by a doctor.

source: Time Magazine

9 Comments

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posted on 31 Dec 2012, 04:36

1. tryingHARD (Posts: 64; Member since: 31 Dec 2012)

Sign and symptoms of such disease is very helpful for the treatment. but it happens to me like all the time..

posted on 31 Dec 2012, 05:37 3

2. Nathan_ingx (Posts: 4280; Member since: 07 Mar 2012)

What if the person dialed some other number while having the so called “dystextia”? Such as 933? Or 922 instead of 911?

posted on 31 Dec 2012, 09:43

3. Kan_wha (Posts: 88; Member since: 25 Jun 2012)

Or the person has fat fingers, suck at texting etc.

posted on 31 Dec 2012, 09:59

4. 1ceTr0n (Posts: 549; Member since: 20 May 2012)

Or your just fat fingering because your illegally trying to text while driving

posted on 31 Dec 2012, 11:19

5. zaryab_hussain77 (Posts: 104; Member since: 30 Jun 2011)

OMG !!!
:D May be the baby which was going to born picked mobile of her mother and texted his father that he was ready to come out in his own language :D

posted on 31 Dec 2012, 12:48 1

6. billybuttpounder (banned) (Posts: 105; Member since: 28 Dec 2012)

......what?

posted on 31 Dec 2012, 15:15

7. skymitch89 (Posts: 1359; Member since: 05 Nov 2010)

I must have a fairly bad case of “dystextia”/"dystypia (samething as “dystextia” but on the computer)". I have auto correct turned on on my phone yet I still misspell and mistype words, and even mistype words on the computer. I have learned, though, to read, re-read, and re-re-read what I've typed to make sure things are spelled correctly and they make sense.