A Man’s Prostate Cancer Gave Him An ‘Uncontrollable’ Irish Accent

A man’s prostate cancer came with a bizarre complication: an Irish accent. The case is one of the few documented reports of the condition, and reportedly the first ever associated with this form of cancer. Tragically, the man ultimately died from his illness.

The unusual medical tale was detailed by the man’s doctors in a paper published late last month in BMJ Case Reports. The man had been dealing with an ongoing case of metastatic prostate cancer when he suddenly began to develop “an uncontrollable ‘Irish brogue’ accent despite no Irish background,” they wrote. They soon determined that he had a classic manifestation of foreign accent syndrome, or FAS.

FAS is considered a type of motor speech disorder and was first described by doctors in 1907. The condition is a bit of a misnomer, since those afflicted aren’t really adopting a foreign-sounding voice. Rather, it’s a neurological dysfunction that alters a person’s natural speech patterns in such a way that listeners perceive it as a changed and often exotic accent.

The condition is rare, with only about 100 or so cases ever documented in the medical literature. And when it is reported, it’s usually thought to be caused by a stroke or traumatic brain injury. There have been a few reports of FAS tied to cancer, but these have usually involved brain tumors.

In this case, though, the doctors speculate that the man’s accent was actually caused by an underlying paraneoplastic neurological disorder (PND)—damage to the brain instigated by an immune response to cancer elsewhere in the body. The condition arose as the man’s cancer transformed into small cell neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC), an aggressive and very often fatal variant. His cancer continued to spread in spite of treatment, with metastases reaching the brain, and he died as a result. Though FAS can clear up over time in many cases as the brain recovers from injury, the man’s accent persisted until his death.