Today in Weird patientthe case of a 50-year-old who developed an Irish accent overnight.
A 50-year-old man comes to Duke University Hospital in North Carolina for a surprising symptom: he started speaking with a sharp Irish accent overnight, despite neither he nor his family being of Irish descent. If his case can make you smile, it is actually very serious. The patient has metastasized prostate cancer and his sudden speaking with a foreign accent might be a sign that his disease is getting worse. The doctors made him pass neurological examinations and an MRI of the brain at the time of his hospitalization, without any abnormality being observed.
On the other hand, his prostate cancer seems to be getting worse, a biopsy indicates that it is turning into neuroendocrine cancer of the prostate, a rare (only 2% of prostate cancers) and very aggressive form of the disease whose life prognosis is dark. Despite chemotherapy, the cancer cells eventually invaded his brain and caused fatal damage. The patient died of ascending paralysis.
When the brain loses its Latin
Foreign accent syndrome is a rare acquired speech disorder in which the affected person starts speaking with a foreign accent overnight. The vast majority of cases appear following a stroke or serious accident. For example, a young French-speaking Belgian woman started speaking with a Flemish accent six months following a road accident. This disorder is the consequence of lesions in the brain, located mainly in the premotor and motor areas of the frontal lobe, but other regions may also be involved.
From the first case described, a Parisian who picked up an Alsatian accent in 1907, only a few hundred patients are known to have developed foreign accent syndrome. The case of our patient is even more remarkable in that cancer-related foreign accent syndromes are extremely rare. For the doctors who treated him, it might be a warning sign that cancer is attacking the brain and causing neurological damage.
