A North Carolina man developed an “uncontrollable Irish accent” until his death after being treated for prostate cancer, according to research published in the British Medical Journal.
The patient, who was only identified as a man in his 50s, presumably suffered from foreign accent syndrome (FAS) after receiving androgen deprivation therapy and being prescribed abiraterone acetate/prednisone.
The report says the man lived in England when he was 20 years old and had distant friends and family from Ireland, but had never visited the country or spoken with a foreign accent.
“Her accent was uncontrollable, present in all settings, and gradually became persistent,” the four researchers wrote in their report, adding that it started 20 months into her treatment.
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FILE – X-ray slides of a patient with prostate cancer (iStock)
Several similar cases have been studied around the world in recent years, but this was the first case of APS described in a patient with prostate cancer and the third described in a patient with malignancy.
Researchers believe his voice change was caused by a condition called paraneoplastic neurological disorder (PND), which occurs when cancer patients’ immune systems attack parts of their brain, muscles, nerves, and spinal cord. .
“Despite chemotherapy, his neuroendocrine prostate cancer progressed, resulting in multifocal brain metastases and probable paraneoplastic ascending palsy leading to his death,” they wrote.
Even as his condition worsened, the accent stuck until his death months later. The report said the man had no neurological examination abnormalities and no psychiatric history. An MRI taken at the onset of symptoms also showed no brain abnormalities.
PSA test (prostate cancer diagnosis) by using test cassette, the result showed positive (double red line) (iStock)
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According to the BBC, other people who have dealt with FAS described it as an unsettling feeling of hearing a “stranger in the house” every time they speak.
One of the first recorded cases was in 1941, when a young Norwegian woman developed a German accent after she was struck by shrapnel from a bomb during a World War II air raid, reported Medical News Today. Her accent caused people to ostracize her, and the locals thought she was a Nazi spy.
In 2006, MNT said that Linda Walker, a UK woman with a Geordie accent, adopted a Jamaican-sounding voice after suffering a stroke.
A 2019 report from the British Medical Journal found that the majority reported having a foreign accent for two months to 18 years, with a median duration of three years. The study included 49 people who developed foreign accent syndrome.
An image of a stethoscope and pen on top of a medical laboratory test result sheet. (Michael McCloskey)
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The case was studied and reported jointly by Duke University in North Carolina and the Carolina Urological Research Center in South Carolina, according to Yahoo News.
