Health
Arizona Woman Wakes Up With British Accent
45 year-old American likely suffers from a rare medical condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome.
Michelle Myers went to bed with a relentless headache and woke up the next day speaking in a British accent that hasn’t gone away since.
“Myers suffers from a rare medical condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) in which patients develop a foreign accent without needing to ever spend time overseas,” Smithsonian.com reported.
FAS usually occurs after traumatic brain injuries or strokes that affect the part of the brain that deciphers language.
Myers also is diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos, a condition in which a person has elastic skin, painful joints and potential rupturing of blood vessels, which can often lead to bruising.
Although why Myers developed FAS is still a mystery, doctors believe it could be due to a hemiplegic migraine, which produces symptoms mimicking a stroke.
This is also not the first time this has happened to Myers. Two times earlier, she woke up speaking in an Australian and Irish accent, each only lasting about two weeks.
“The big thing is to know that she’s not faking it,” Toby Yaltho, a neurologist at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Neurology Associates, told ABC in 2016 after treating another case of FAS.
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