Speaking gibberish has long been known to be a telltale sign of a stroke, but how about sending nonsensical text messages? It turns out, those can also be a key indicator of a life-threatening loss of blood supply to the brain — a newly recognized phenomenon called dystextia.
After receiving a series of befuddling texts from his 25-year-old pregnant wife regarding her due date, a worried husband recently brought her to Brigham and Women’s Hospital where sure enough, neurologists diagnosed a stroke; they reported the case in this week’s issue of the journal Archives of Neurology. “The word dystextia has been used before in the medical literature to describe someone having a migraine headache who is having trouble coordinating fingers to make appropriate texts,” said Dr. Joshua Klein, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s. It’s also been used to describe arm weakness from a previous stroke that has rendered someone unable to tap out legible words. But this is the first reported case of dystextia that Klein knows of to describe the aphasia that occurs in 20 to 40 percent of stroke patients. The nonsensical texts were the first warning signs that were caught, though looking back the woman had also had trouble filing out her medical forms in the doctor’s office earlier that day.
