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marketrent OP t1_jbbbflh wrote

Excerpt from the linked summary^1,2 by Vishwam Sankaran:

>The 50-year-old man from North Carolina, who had metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer, showed symptoms consistent with foreign accent syndrome (FAS), according to a recent study in the British Medical Journal.

>The new research marks the first reported instance of a person developing FAS linked to a prostate cancer diagnosis.

>While the 50-year-old lived in England in his 20s and had friends from Ireland, the case study mentions that he had reportedly never spoken with the Irish accent.

>“His accent was uncontrollable, present in all settings and gradually became persistent” until his death, researchers wrote in the study.

>Scientists suspect the patient‘s voice change was likely due to paraneoplastic neurological disorder (PND) – a condition in which a cancer patient’s immune system attacks their nervous system, including parts of the spinal cord, nerves and muscles.

>“His presentation was most consistent with an underlying PND,” they said.

>FAS is a speech disorder that causes a sudden change to a person’s speech patterns, with previous studies finding it to be a condition linked to brain damage, such as following a stroke.

>Since the first-ever diagnosis of the condition in 1907, there have so far been over 110 known cases of the syndrome across the world.

^1 Scientists reveal why American man with prostate cancer developed ‘uncontrolled’ Irish accent, Vishwam Sankaran for the Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/american-man-irish-brogue-prostate-cancer-b2292537.html

^2 Broderick A, Labriola MK, Shore N, et al. Foreign accent syndrome as a heralding manifestation of transformation to small cell neuroendocrine prostate cancer. BMJ Case Reports CP 2023;16:e251655. http://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2022-251655

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