An American man suddenly developed an “uncontrollable Irish accent” after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, without ever setting foot in Ireland or having any immediate family there. The remarkable accent first emerged twenty months after his treatment and persisted until his death.
MGDS
Latest update:
17-02-23, 14:20
The fifty-year-old from the American state of North Carolina probably suffered from the ‘foreign accent syndrome’ (FAS), says the leading British Medical Journal. The syndrome comes about due to a rare condition where the patient develops a speech disorder that produces a foreign accent. Several people with the exceptional disorder have already been registered worldwide.
This case was studied by Duke University in North Carolina and the South Carolina Urological Research Center. They noted that the syndrome was first identified here in a patient with prostate cancer. “His accent was uncontrollable, it was present in all kinds of situations and gradually became persistent,” the researchers write.
No abnormalities
The report also states that he had “no neurological abnormalities, psychiatric history, or brain MRI abnormalities at the onset of symptoms.” How it is possible that the patient developed the strange accent, according to the researchers, is due to the syndrome paraneoplastic neurological syndrome (PNS). This occurs in cancer patients when the immune system attacks certain parts of the muscles, nerves, spinal cord and brain.
Other people who have experienced foreign accent syndrome tell the BBC that when speaking they felt as if they heard a “stranger in the house”.
One of the first reported cases of foreign accent syndrome occurred in 1941 in Norway. A young woman then began speaking with a German accent after being hit by shrapnel in an air raid in World War II. However, the locals thought she was a spy for the Nazis, the BBC writes.
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