Academics at the University of Toronto studied a selection of Christie's novels written between the ages of 28 and 82, and they believe that her word choices reveal that she had Alzheimers. “The vocabulary size of the creator of Poirot and Miss Marple decreased sharply as she neared the end of her life, by 15 to 30%, while repetition of phrases and indefinite word usage (something, thing, anything) in her novels increased significantly.”
Boy, does that sound familiar. Before he died from complications related to his Alzheimers, my dad was pretty much defined by the word indefinite. For a while, he remembered that I wrote books, but not which one I was working on. At the very end, he could not remember my name.
Read the full story here. Here’s another story with even more details.
