Why Do People Talk So Much? Alzheimer’s Symptoms Include Speaking, Long Stories

While most Alzheimer’s research has tended to focus on memory loss, new findings revealed the loss of more advanced language or vocabulary later in life – particularly those who speak often and tell long stories – could also be an early sign of the debilitating disease, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

“One of the greatest challenges right now in terms of Alzheimer’s disease is to detect changes very early on when they are still very subtle and to distinguish them from changes we know occur with normal aging,” clinical director of the Psychology Assessment Center at Massachusetts General Hospital Janet Cohen Sherman said.

Sherman spoke at the American Association of Science in Boston and said she found language deficits in those with mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, which has been linked to an early sign of dementia. The conference ran from Thursday to Monday.

“Many of the studies to date have looked at changes in memory, but we also know changes occur in language,” Sherman said. “I’d hope in the next five years we’d have a new linguistic test.”

Sherman used the later writings of authors like Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie and the vocabulary they used in works when they were older, though the latter wasn’t diagnosed with dementia. She also perused the press conferences of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and found Reagan was more repetitive later in life.

“Ronald Reagan started to have a decline in the number of unique words with repetitions of statements over time,” Sherman said. “[He] started using more fillers, more empty phrases, like ‘thing’ or ‘something’ or things like ‘basically’ or ‘actually’ or ‘well’.”

Many believed Reagan, who was the oldest president to leave office in January 1989, suffered from Alzheimer’s while in office. He died after a long battle with the disease in 2004.

One study, involving 22 healthy younger people, 22 healthy older people and 22 people with MCI, found those with MCI couldn’t create a simple sentence involving three words, “pen,” “ink” and paper. They would instead create a story about how they acquired the pen at a store.

In the U.S., Alzheimer’s has been the sixth-leading causing of death. More than five million Americans are living with the disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.