I was raised in a family where our sense of humor tends toward the sarcastic. While many of my friends enjoy my fairly quick whit and sarcastic tone, not everyone shares their enthusiasm. I've gotten myself into trouble a few times, including one experience with a community college business professor who took my sarcasm seriously and rewarded me with a 15 minute rant which made it evident that he totally missed the sarcasm. He left for about 10 minutes and then came back and gave me the 5 minute version. I've never really understood how he could have taken my comment so seriously.

Today I saw this story and it put this whole experience in a new perspective.

Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but Australian scientists are using it to diagnose dementia, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic.

The authors say that the study, published in the journal Brain, helps explain why patients with the condition behave the way they do and why, they are unable to pick up their caregivers' moods.

"This is significant because if caregivers are angry, sad or depressed, the patient won't pick this up. It is often very upsetting for family members," said John Hodges, the senior author of the paper.

"(FTD) patients present changes in personality and behaviour. They find it difficult to interact with people, they don't pick up on social cues, they lack empathy [and] they make bad judgements," he said.

"People with FTD become very gullible and they often part with large amounts of money," he said, adding that one in 4,000 people around the world are afflicted with the condition.

Researchers began studying the role of sarcasm in detecting FTD, because it requires a patient to spot discrepancies between a person's words and the tone of their voice, Hodges said.

"One of the things about FTD patients is that they don't detect humour – they are very bad at double meaning and a lot of humour (other than sarcasm) is based on double meaning," he said.

Given this professor's advanced age and some of his other quirky habits, like collecting soda cans for recycling, I can't help but wonder if perhaps he was starting to suffer from dementia. It could explain his extreme reaction. I'm actually pretty excited. All these years I've been wondering if I'm just a jerk with my sarcasm. It is nice to know that I'm not being a jerk, I'm just providing free medical screenings.