A man from the United States developed an “uncontrollable Irish accent” after being diagnosed with prostate cancer despite never having visited Ireland, researchers from the United States announced as quoted by the BBC on Friday, Agerpres reported.

According to a study published in the British Medical Journal, a patient who lived in the state of North Carolina and was just over 50 years old, most likely developed “foreign accent syndrome” (FAS).

This very rare syndrome caused the American patient, who had no close relatives in Ireland, to speak with an Irish accent until his death.

Several similar cases have been reported around the world in recent years.

The case of a patient from the United States was studied by researchers from Duke University in North Carolina and the Urology Research Center in South Carolina.

“To our knowledge, this is the first case of FAS identified in a patient with prostate cancer and the third to be identified in a patient with malignancy,” the study authors said.

Many patient identifiers, including their name and nationality, were not included in the study.

However, the researchers discovered that the patient had lived in England for a time when he was in his early 20s, and that he had very distant relatives who lived in Ireland. Before the diagnosis, the patient never spoke with a foreign accent.

“His accent was uncontrollable, present in all situations and gradually became stable,” added the American doctors, clarifying that this strange style of speech began to manifest itself 20 months after the patient’s oncology treatment began.

Despite the worsening of his illness, his Irish accent remained until his death, which occurred a few months later.

“He had no neurological abnormalities, no psychiatric history, and an MRI showed no brain abnormalities at the onset of symptoms. Despite chemotherapy, his endocrine prostate cancer progressed, creating multiple brain metastases and a likely paraneoplastic ascending paralysis that caused his death, US doctors added.

What would be the explanation

They suspect that the patient’s voice change was caused by a condition called “paraneoplastic neurological disorder” (PND).

PND occurs when a cancer patient’s immune system attacks parts of their brain, as well as their muscles, nerves, and spinal cord.

Other FAS developers told BBC reporters of the unsettling feeling they had of hearing “a stranger in their house” every time they spoke.

In 2006, the British Linda Walker suffered a stroke and then discovered that her usual Northern English accent had changed to a Jamaican one.

One of the first reported cases of FAS occurred in 1941, when a woman in Norway developed a German accent after being hit by shrapnel during a World War II air raid.

At that time, local residents shunned her, considering her a Nazi spy.