{"id":230265,"date":"2026-01-31T21:13:17","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T03:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/signs-of-sir-terry-pratchetts-dementia-may-have-been-hidden-in-his-books"},"modified":"2026-01-31T21:13:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T03:13:17","slug":"signs-of-sir-terry-pratchetts-dementia-may-have-been-hidden-in-his-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/signs-of-sir-terry-pratchetts-dementia-may-have-been-hidden-in-his-books","title":{"rendered":"Signs of Sir Terry Pratchett\u2019s dementia may have been hidden in his books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/signs-of-sir-terry-pratchetts-dementia-may-have-been-hidden-in-his-books2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Signs of Sir Terry Pratchett\u2019s dementia may have been present in his writing a decade before his official diagnosis, new research has found. Researchers have examined the lexical diversity\u2014a measure of how varied an author\u2019s word choices are\u2014of 33 books from Pratchett\u2019s Discworld series, focusing specifically on his use of nouns and adjectives.<\/p>\n<p>The study found that Pratchett\u2019s language in \u201cThe Lost Continent,\u201d written almost 10 years before his diagnosis of posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a rare form of Alzheimer\u2019s, showed a significant decline in the complexity of the language used compared to his previous works.<\/p>\n<p>The research team hopes that the study may aid in the early detection of dementia, for which there is currently no cure. The work is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2076-3425\/16\/1\/94\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Brain Sciences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Signs of Sir Terry Pratchett\u2019s dementia may have been present in his writing a decade before his official diagnosis, new research has found. Researchers have examined the lexical diversity\u2014a measure of how varied an author\u2019s word choices are\u2014of 33 books from Pratchett\u2019s Discworld series, focusing specifically on his use of nouns and adjectives. The study [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}