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Agatha Christie And Nuns Tell A Tale Of Alzheimer's
"Ian Lancashire, an English professor at the University of Toronto, has spent much of his career trying to see past the words on the page and into the psyche of the author. He makes concordances of different texts; basically, an alphabetical list of all the words and the contexts in which they appear in a text. This is a tradition that dates back to medieval monks, who would make concordances of the Bible in the hopes of seeing the mind of God.
Lancashire has somewhat more modest goals. He studies the works of authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. (Among other things, he discovered that Milton never used the word "because" in any of his works. Why? Who knows.) But in the mid '90s, Lancashire decided he wanted to focus on a more modern — and less "literary" — author. So he turned to one of the most published authors in the world: Agatha Christie."
Agatha Christie wrote 80 novels. By running the concordance Lancashire noticed that starting with novel number 70 ("Elephants Can Remember") her vocabulary decreased by 20%, and it wasn't nearly as well written as her earlier novels. From this it has been concluded that she had Alzheimer's Disease.
We can never know for sure if Christie actually had Alzheimer's. But a separate study out of the University of Minnesota lends support to the idea that there might be signs in our writing of Alzheimer's disease. And those signs might be there very early on.
The so-called "Nun Study" was started by David Snowdon at the University of Minnesota in 1990 (although the study participants are not officially nuns, they're sisters). Snowdon wanted to look at aging over time, and decided to focus on sisters because they all had fairly similar histories and backgrounds. Most of them joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame congregation when they were 18, and all had abstained from smoking or drinking. So Snowdon signed up 678 sisters, all over the age of 75, from the order. All of the sisters agreed to donate a small part of their brains to the study after they died.
Researchers would visit once a year to administer memory tests, and it was during one of these visits that Snowdon made a fortuitous discovery: He was told of a collection of biographies that the sisters were required to write upon entering the order, in many cases more than 50 years before the study started. "It was a major, major find," says Serguei Pakhomov, a current researcher with the study.Snowdon and his team evaluated the essays based on grammatical complexity and idea density – the average number of discrete ideas contained in every 10 written words.
Here's an example of a sentence packed with ideas, from the one of the sister's diaries:
"It was about a half hour before midnight between February 28 and 29 of the leap year 1912 when I began to live, and to die, as the third child of my mother, whose maiden name is Hilda Hoffman, and my father, Otto Schmidt..."
And here's an example of less idea-rich sentence:
"I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on May 24, 1913, and was baptized in St. James Church..."
Snowdon discovered that sisters who scored poorly on these two measures — like the second example — were much more likely to develop dementia. Sisters within the lower third of the sample with respect to idea density, for example, were 60 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's than a sister in the upper third. In fact, using the essays, the researchers could predict with 92 percent accuracy whether the brain of a particular sister, investigated after their death, would contain the plaques and lesions in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's Disease.
Kelvin Lim, the current director of the "Nun Study," cautions that their finding is merely an association and doesn't mean that simple writing causes dementia later in life. And while other studies suggest that the initial stages of Alzheimer's may appear very early, it is still unclear whether writing could be used as a reliable early warning sign."
Does this make you want to dig out something you wrote years ago and compare it to what you wrote yesterday?
Sister Nicolette, one of the nuns in the study, died at age 102.
