This is the story of an American who suddenly started rolling the “R” as if he had grown up in Dublin. The 50-year-old man has prostate cancer and begins to develop an Irish accent without being able to control or erase it. At least that’s what scientists from Duke University in North Carolina and the Carolina Urologic Research Center report. in the British Medical Journal.
What the patient is suffering from has a name, and is not unknown to doctors (although this is rare), it’s the “foreign accent syndrome”. But in general, the latter is triggered following a traumatic event for the brain: a strokea very intense emotional shock,… This is how a Norwegian woman started speaking with a German accent after a bombing, or how an American woman woke up with a Chinese accent, like the recalls BFMTV.
A part of the brain indirectly affected by cancer
How is this explained? An area of the brain related to language is affected, which changes the patient’s diction. But only three cases of tumors have been linked to this syndrome, and this is a first in the case of small cell neuroendocrine prostate cancer, which affected the patient in question.
The most amazing thing is that the patient has no apparent brain problem or psychiatric history. Despite chemotherapy treatment, her cancer “progressed leading to multifocal brain metastases, and most likely a paraneoplastic neurological syndrome (distant effects of cancer that are not caused by a tumor or its metastases), with consequence of his death”, they explain. The brain would have been indirectly impacted by the development of the disease.
The man kept this accent for about 20 months, before passing away. Nevertheless, further research will need to take place to understand the occurrence of this accent.
Sources: Foreign accent syndrome as a heralding manifestation of transformation to small cell neuroendocrine prostate cancer, BMJ.
