Agatha Christie May Have Suffered From Alzheimer's
NPRreports that Ian Lancashire, an English professor at the University of Toronto, has determined that famous mystery Agatha Christie may have been suffering from Alzheimer's near the near of end of her career. Lancashire used a computer program to analyze Agatha Christie's 73rd novel, which she wrote at age 81. The program found that the novel contained 20% less unique words than Agatha's previous, more verbose novels.
Lancashire took 16 of her novels, written over more than 50 years, and fed the text into a computer program. The computer then spit out data about the vocabulary of the works, such as the frequency of different words and the number of different words used in each text.
When Lancashire looked at the results for Christie's 73rd novel, written when she was 81 years old, he saw something strange. Her use of words like "thing," "anything," "something," "nothing" - terms that Lancashire classifies as "indefinite words" - spiked. At the same time, number of different words she used dropped by 20 percent. "That is astounding," says Lancashire, "that is one-fifth of her vocabulary lost."
The reduction of words does sound significant. NPR says Agatha Christie also complained about an "inability to concentrate in her later years." NPR also says friends reported the author would sometimes have "fits of anger and wouldn't make sense in conversations." That all fits with an Alzheimer's or dimensia diagnosis. Agatha Christie's 73rd book was called Elephants Can Remember. She published at least three more books after Elephants Can Remember according to this list.
NPR 