US man developed Irish accent after cancer diagnosis: Report

NORTH CAROLINA - A US man developed an “uncontrollable Irish accent” after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, researchers say.

The 50-year-old man is said to have never visited Ireland and does not have immediate family from the country, according to a BBC report.

The British Medical Journal said the man from the American state of North Carolina was probably afflicted with foreign accent syndrome (FAS).

The accent first developed 20 months into his treatment and remained until his death.

Many details of the man’s identifying characteristics, such as his name and nationality, were not included in the research report.

However, it does say that the man lived in England in his 20s and had friends and distant family members from Ireland.

He had never previously spoken with the accent, the report added.

The case was jointly studied and reported by Duke University in North Carolina and the Carolina Urologic Research Centre in South Carolina.

“To our knowledge, this is the first case of FAS described in a patient with prostate cancer and the third described in a patient with malignancy,” said the report’s authors.

“His accent was uncontrollable… and gradually became persistent,” the researchers said in their report.

They added that the man had “no neurological examination abnormalities, psychiatric history or MRI of the brain abnormalities at symptom onset”.

The researchers think the change was caused by a condition known as paraneoplastic neurological disorder, according to the BBC report.

It occurs when a cancer patient’s immune system attacks part of the brain, as well as muscles, nerves and spinal cord.

Other such cases have been recorded globally, with one of the first being reported in 1941.

A young Norwegian woman developed a German accent after she was hit by bomb shrapnel during a World War II air raid.

She was shunned by locals because they thought she was a Nazi spy.