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.