A rare disease in which a person begins to speak in an unfamiliar language

An American man began speaking with an ‘Irish accent’ after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, researchers say. Amazingly, the man had never been to Ireland.

The North Carolina resident, who was in his 50s, likely suffered from Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) and was losing control of his accent, the British Medical Journal reported. This rare syndrome gave the man, who had no close ties to Ireland, an ‘accent’ that persisted until his death.

Several similar cases have been recorded globally in recent years. Duke University in North Carolina and Carolina Urologic Research Center in South Carolina jointly studied and reported the case.

‘To our knowledge, this is the first case of FAS described in a prostate cancer patient,’ said the report’s authors. The identity of the man, including his name and nationality, was not included in the report.

According to the report, the man lived in England in his 20s and had friends and distant family members from Ireland.

But he added that he had never spoken in a foreign accent before. “The man’s tone was uncontrollable and gradually became constant,” the researchers said in their report. He added that his condition started 20 months after he started treatment. Even as his condition worsened, this tone did not change and remained the same until his death.

‘Despite chemotherapy, his neuroendocrine prostate cancer continued to grow, causing the cancer to spread to other parts of the body and possibly causing his death from paraneoplastic ascending paralysis.’ Researchers suspect that the voice change was caused by a condition called paraneoplastic neurological disorder (PND). PND occurs when a cancer patient’s immune system attacks parts of their brain as well as their muscles, nerves and spinal cord.

Other sufferers of Foreign Accent Syndrome or FAS have reported feeling like a ‘stranger in the house’ whenever they speak.

In 2006, British woman Linda Walker suffered a stroke and found that her native accent was replaced by a Jamaican accent. One of the first reported cases was in 1941 when a young Norwegian woman adopted a German accent after being hit by shrapnel during a World War II air raid. The locals started to shun them because they thought they were Nazi spies.

Professor Sophie Scott said: ‘A foreign accent is usually impaired by very small amounts of brain damage.’ He said more cases have been reported in recent years, perhaps because there is now more awareness of the condition.

He said that brain damage causes the patient to not be able to speak in the way we are used to and our brain interprets the person’s slurred speech as a foreign or unfamiliar accent.