A North Carolina cancer patient developed foreign accent syndrome during treatment—and continued speaking with an "uncontrollable Irish accent" until his death, researchers say. FAS is incredibly rare and most common in people with psychiatric disorders or those who've suffered head trauma or strokes, according to researchers at Duke University and the Carolina Urologic Research Center. "To our knowledge, this is the first case of FAS described in a patient with prostate cancer," reads their report published the British Medical Journal. It describes just two other known cases of FAS in cancer patients, occurring in females in their 50s and 60s between 2009 and 2011, per the Guardian.
The man in his 50s had friends and distant family members from Ireland but had never visited the country, nor had he spoken with an Irish accent previously. His Irish Brogue accent appeared 20 months into his treatment, per the BBC and Fox News—it was actually "the presenting manifestation" of transformation of the man's hormone-sensitive prostate cancer to small cell neuroendocrine prostate cancer, "a previously undescribed phenomenon," according to the report—and persisted for months as the cancer spread to his brain and eventually led to paralysis and death.
"His accent was uncontrollable, present in all settings and gradually became persistent," according to researchers, who note the man presented no neurological or brain abnormalities and had no psychiatric history when the FAS began. They suspect the change in speech was the result of a paraneoplastic neurological disorder (PND), which occurs when cancer patients' immune systems attack the brain, muscles, nerves, and spinal cord. "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," the report concludes. (More Foreign Accent Syndrome stories.)
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