‘Dystextia': Mangled Texts Can Point to Brain Disorders

You might want to turn off your phone's autocorrect, because your garbled typing could save your life. Doctors are calling it "dystextia," when brain-related problems such as strokes start showing up in text messages, resulting in bizarre ones, reports Reuters. Researchers say the first documented case of dystextia occurred last December when a 25-year-old pregnant woman sent a series of messages to her husband, who knew her auto-correct was not on:

• "every where thinging days nighing"
• "Some is where!"

At the hospital, doctors found she had stroke symptoms, and an MRI confirmed her brain wasn't getting enough blood. The good news is that her symptoms soon went away, and the pregnancy turned out fine after doctors gave her blood thinners. "As the accessibility of electronic communication continues to advance, the growing digital record will likely become an increasingly important means of identifying neurologic disease, particularly in patient populations that rely more heavily on written rather than spoken communications," wrote the researchers in the Archives of Neurology. (More text messages stories.)