Conference Coverage

Perplexing text messages may be the sole sign of stroke


 

REPORTING FROM AAN 2019

Incoherent text messages may be the first or even the only clue to an underlying stroke, according to two case reports described at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. The phenomenon, dubbed “dystextia” and characterized by confusing interpersonal electronic communications, is not new but is increasingly relevant to clinical practice now that smartphones are essentially ubiquitous, said the case report authors.

In fact, time to intervention may be positively impacted if access to a patient’s texts and emails can be obtained, said lead author Taylor R. Anderson, a medical student at Wayne State University, Detroit.

The findings sparked interest in further research into the underlying causes and implications of dystextia: “It will be interesting to see if there are specific regions of the brain that are responsible for texting, and how they relate to other forms of communication such as handwriting and typing,” the authors said in their poster presentation.

Mr. Anderson and colleagues described two patients evaluated at Ascension St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit who had stroke presenting as difficulty in typing text messages.

One case was a 43-year-old woman who experienced headache consistent with her usual migraine and spelling errors in her texts and posts on Facebook. She had visuospatial anomalies and left facial droop on evaluation. A brain MRI revealed acute embolic infarcts in the parietal and right frontal lobes, according to Mr. Anderson and coauthors.

The second case was a 66-year-old woman who had difficulty writing texts and typed notes. A head CT done in an urgent care facility showed a left frontal subacute infarct, which, according to the authors, was likely related to risk factors including hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia.

These cases show that dystextia can arise after lesions in either hemisphere, the authors said. However, they emphasized that both cases involved the dominant cerebral hemisphere, while by contrast, there have not been previous reports of dystextia due to nondominant hemispheric infarct.

It stands to reason that stroke would affect the ability to text, a multipurpose task that involves use of motor, language, and vision skills, the authors said. Strokes could affect not only skills needed to type, read, and express thoughts, but also visuospatial memory mapping to letters on the device’s keyboard, they noted.

The left frontal and superior parietal regions have been implicated in handwriting in neuroimaging experiments, the authors said, while the operculum and left second frontal convolution are involved in typing.

The authors had nothing to disclose.

SOURCE: Anderson T et al. AAN 2019. Abstract P5.3-062.

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