Imagine waking up and speaking in an accent that you've never had.
Doctors are saying this is what happened to a man who had cancer treatments:
From The Guardian:
A cancer patient in the US developed what researchers say was an "uncontrollable Irish accent" during treatment, despite never having been to Ireland nor having immediate relatives from the country.
While still rare, cases of foreign accent syndrome (FAS) are more common in patients following strokes or head trauma, or who have psychiatric disorders, according to the experts from North Carolina's Duke University and the Carolina Urologic Research Center of South Carolina...
"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.
The man had prostate cancer, and he's got treatment for it. During this treatment, SOMETHING triggered in him and changed his accent.
I could see it in a head injury, and that has been seen before, but prostate cancer treatment?
Some details of the man's case, including his own nationality, were not revealed. But researchers said he maintained the Irish accent through about 20 months of treatment, and a gradual onset of paralysis, until his death.
Although the man had lived in England in his 20s, and had friends and more distant family members from Ireland, he had never visited Ireland, nor previously spoken in an Irish accent.
This is just wild.
It's tragic that the man died from prostate cancer while he was in this state of confusion and the doctors obviously could not figure out what happened before he succumbed to the disease.
"He had no neurological examination abnormalities, psychiatric history or MRI of the brain abnormalities at symptom onset," 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."
The authors 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.
So, PND is somewhat common, but this uncontrollable foreign accent has never been observed in connection to this disorder before.
