A prostate cancer patient developed an “uncontrollable Irish accent”, despite never having been to Ireland and having no close family links there, doctors in the US have reported.
The man's development of "foreign accent syndrome" (FAS) was one of only three cases of the phenomenon in cancer patients that the researchers could trace, the Guardian reported. The rare syndrome is more usually found in patients who have suffered strokes, head injuries, or who have psychiatric disorders.
The unnamed US patient, who was in his 50s, was being treated for metastatic prostate cancer when he began speaking with the Irish accent, the experts from North Carolina’s Duke University and the Carolina Urologic Research Centre of South Carolina reported. He maintained the accent through about 20 months of treatment before he died.
Both other cases of the syndrome in cancer patients involved women in their 50s and 60s. “To our knowledge, this is the first case of FAS described in a patient with prostate cancer and the third described in a patient with malignancy,” said the report, published in the British Medical Journal.
Although the man had lived in England in his 20s, and had some distant family from Ireland, he had never visited Ireland, nor previously spoken in an Irish accent. “He had no neurological examination abnormalities, psychiatric history or MRI of the brain abnormalities at symptom onset,” the report said.
The US doctors suspect the paraneoplastic neurological disorder (PND), which develops in some cancer patients whose immune systems attack parts of the brain, spinal cord, nerves or muscles, was responsible. “His accent was uncontrollable, present in all settings and gradually became persistent,” the report said.
“Despite chemotherapy, his neuroendocrine prostate cancer progressed resulting in multifocal brain metastases and a likely paraneoplastic ascending paralysis leading to his death."
Some who have developed FAS regain their original accent, either spontaneously or through intensive speech therapy, while for others the change is permanent. In 2010, the case was reported of Sarah Colwill, a British woman whose native west country accent disappeared to be replaced with a Chinese one - about seven years after she had a stroke.
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Four years earlier, another British stroke victim, Linda Walker, from Newcastle, developed a Jamaican accent. “Not only did I have a stroke, but I got lumbered with this foreign accent syndrome as well,” she said at the time. “I didn’t realize what I sounded like, but then my speech therapist played a tape of me talking. I was just devastated.”
The US report said the case of the patient with the Irish accent underscored a need for more research. “This unusual presentation highlights the importance of additional literature on FAS and PNDs associated with prostate cancer to improve understanding of the links between these rare syndromes and clinical trajectory,” it concluded.
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