Finding merriment in the misfortune of others has become a sort of national pastime of late, but there’s a more serious angle to a few cases of inappropriate laughter – it could be an early warning sign of the onset of dementia.
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Almost all of the respondents said, with hindsight, that they had noticed a shift in the nine years before the dementia had been diagnosed.
It can be hard to know if a loved-one’s forgetfulness or absentmindedness is the tip of a frightening iceberg, but a new study from the United Kingdom has suggested there may be a tell-tale sign that a person is developing dementia, and it can happen many years before a diagnosis.
It’s important to note that the dementia patients didn’t have these kind of reactions before.
Other changes in humor were less sinister, including laughing at a badly parked auto or at a barking dog.
It was also found in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
The team found that people with a type of frontotemporal dementia, the most common form of the disease in the under-55s – had an “altered sense of humour” compared to healthy individuals.
The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, asked patients’ loved ones to rate the sufferer’s liking for different types of comedy, ranging from slapstick to satire and inappropriate humour.
Frontotemporal dementia is one of the more rare forms of the disease and it affects the part of the brain involved with personality and behaviour. These people had known the patients for over 15 years before they got affected by the disease. As such, it’s not entirely surprising to hear it can also alter humour. Did you notice any changes to a loved one’s sense of humour? “We’ve highlighted the need to shift the emphasis from dementia being exclusively about memory loss”.
‘Humour could be a particularly sensitive way of detecting dementia because it puts demands on so many different aspects of brain function, such as puzzle solving, emotion and social awareness’.
‘A deeper understanding of the full range of dementia symptoms will increase our ability to make a timely and accurate diagnosis’. We need to see larger studies, following people for extended periods of time, to understand how and when changes in humour could act as a red flag for underlying brain changes.
The researchers involved in the study advise anyone concerned with changes in their behaviour should contact a doctor immediately.
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“She’d forget family birthdays, laugh if someone had an accident or she heard someone was unwell and was even sacked from her job – all completely out of character”.
