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The study, from academics at Cardiff University, Loughborough University and the University of Oxford, used computer software to analyse the range of nouns and adjectives used in 33 of his best-selling Discworld novels.
The results show a significant decrease in the diversity of nouns and adjectives in his later works. This shift was particularly marked in the diversity of adjectives, which decreased below a defined threshold approximately ten years before Pratchett's formal diagnosis.
Sir Terry Pratchett died in 2015 at the age of 66. He had posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease that primarily affects visual processing.
Study co-author Dr Melody Pattison, based at Cardiff University's School of English, Communication and Philosophy, said: "Our analysis of Sir Terry Pratchett's novels suggests that subtle changes in linguistic patterns, such as decreased lexical diversity, may precede clinical diagnosis of dementia by a considerable margin. In particular we found the richness of descriptive language in his books gradually narrowed."
We would normally expect less lexical diversity as texts get longer, but even after controlling for text length our findings were still significant. This was not something a reader would necessarily notice, but rather a subtle, progressive change. --Dr Melody Pattison
[...] "Research indicates that memory problems may not be the first symptom of dementia. We wanted to explore whether language could be an early warning sign, and to do this, we used Sir Terry Pratchett's books, who himself suffered dementia.
"Our analysis found that Sir Terry's use of language did indeed change during his career. These results suggest that language may be one of the first signs of dementia, and Sir Terry's books reveal a potential new approach for early diagnosis."
Journal Reference: Brain Sci. 2026, 16(1), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci16010094
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday February 12, @06:51PM
For me this might work. For a lot of us it might work. It is a fairly substantial and solid body of text collected over a decade or whatnot. From my user number I was probably signed up within a day or less of it going public. I don't recall now but it can't have been to long after.
That said the text here might leave some things to be desired from a professional viewpoint. It might in some regard be a lot more casual writing. I guess most message boards and such postings are. As in there is no large amount of editing involved, for the obviously technical limitations as there is no edit function.
In that regard perhaps that is even better as a diagnostic tool. More of a direct flow from the brain to the keyboard instead of having been edited over and over again.
The other issue, for me at least, is that I'm not a native English speaker. It's more of a third language. But it might be good enough due to my age and having written and spoken it for at least four:ish decades or so.