In December 2007, author Terry Pratchett posted a note on his illustrator’s website under the heading “AN EMBUGGERANCE.” He had been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, he wrote, and it was what had actually been behind the phantom stroke he’d had earlier that year. Pratchett was 59. He asked people to keep things cheerful and added a postscript clarifying that the announcement should be read as “I am not dead.”

He was right about that for another seven years. In that time he published seven more books, gave the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, donated heavily to research and became the most visible person in Britain living openly with dementia. He died in 2015 at age 66.

A study published in the journal Brain Sciences, however, argues that if you had the right software, you could have seen it coming in 1998.

Researchers at Cardiff University, Loughborough University and Oxford ran 33 of the 41 Discworld novels through lexical analysis, excluding the eight that were very short or written for younger readers. They were measuring lexical diversity, which is how varied a writer’s word choices are relative to the total number of words. The specific metric is type-token ratio. If a book uses 5,000 distinct adjectives across 200,000 words, that’s a different ratio than 3,000 distinct adjectives across the same 200,000.

What they found was that both noun and adjective diversity dropped significantly in the later books, with adjectives falling below a defined threshold starting with The Last Continent, the 22nd........

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