An American suffering from prostate cancer developed an “uncontrollable Irish accent” during treatment, according to information from the Guardian relayed by BFM TV. This extremely rare disorder has been documented in a medical report published in the British Medical Journalin late January, by researchers at Duke University in North Carolina and the Carolina Urologic Research Center in South Carolina.
Concretely, this patient began to speak persistently with this accent typical of Ireland, characterized in particular by a hardening of certain consonants, in particular the “R”. A surprising fact, especially since the man in his fifties has never been to Ireland. According to the information in the report, however, he would have lived in England during his twenties and would have friends and distant family of Irish origin. The man kept his accent for twenty months, until his death.
A unique case in the world
“To our knowledge, this is the first case of the syndrome described in a patient with prostate cancer and the third described in a patient with a malignant tumor,” the scientists explained. The foreign accent syndrome appears most often after a strong shock, head trauma or stroke. Events that damage certain areas of the brain.
According to the researchers, this syndrome would have appeared in humans through the proliferation of “multifocal brain metastases” which would be the cause of a “paraneoplastic neurological disorder” having attacked his brain. Further research will be carried out. This disorder, recorded for the first time during the Second World War, remains in any case very rare and can sometimes be gradually treated by speech therapy sessions.