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Diagnosing dementia with sarcasm?

After years of being lambasted as “the lowest form of wit”, sarcasm has fallen into the good graces of doctors as a tool for diagnosing dementia.

John Hodges, a neurologist at Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues designed two sets of short plays that were identical except for the tone of voice: words were said either seriously, or sarcastically.


Patients with Alzheimer’s could tell the difference between the plays, whereas patients with fronto-temporal dementia could not, Hodges and colleagues report in Brain.

“This new study indicates that testing people’s ability to detect sarcasm may help diagnose fronto-temporal dementia,” Rebecca Wood, Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust told the Telegraph.

FTD affects 1 in every 4,000 people, and “people with FTD become very gullible and they often part with large amounts of money”, says Hodges. Currently, FTD is difficult that diagnose or to tell apart from depression, schizophrenia or personality disorders.

Here, at The Great Beyond, we have no doubt that doctors worldwide will embrace sarcasm tests.

In other news, Mugabe was trying to be sarcastic when he said recently that there was no cholera in Zimbabwe, the Guardian reports. No word yet on whether inappropriate use of sarcasm is also a sign of dementia.

Comments

  1. Report this comment

    hadie lane said:

    Your comments on sarcasm, that people with FTD cannot detect it, I find not to be correct. My husband who has been diagnosed with frontal temporal lobe dementia can detect sarcasm. He has many other problems but this is not one of them at least not in the stage he is in now. His diagnosis is by two different medical facilities. UCSF is privileged with all his records.

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    Eibren said:

    Hadie, the alternative, which you do not countenance, is that he may have Altzheimer’s.

    The article states that they are difficult to differentiate.

    Why would you automatically assume that the finding is incorrect, rather than the diagnosis you presently have?

    If his present diagnosis is incorrect, could that have treatment implications? You may wish to discuss this with his physicians.

  3. Report this comment

    Hadie Lane said:

    Thank you for your reply to my blog of December 28, 2008. I would like to add that my husband was checked out further for amyloid in his brain during 2009. All tests were negative and UCSF has concluded there is no alzheimers. He has a classical case of FTD Dementia and he can recognize sarcasm. I would say he is now in the middle stage of his disease. As for this FTD patient he is capable of recognizing sarcasm.

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