Foreign accents, alien hands suprisingly real medical oddities
F. Scott Fitzgerald invented the reverse-aging phenomenon at the heart of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," starring Brad Pitt. But there are plenty of unusual ailments that are quite real. Here are just a few of them:
Foreign accent syndrome. Seemingly out of the blue, sufferers start speaking with what sounds like a foreign accent - often of a country they've never visited. In one noted case, a Norwegian woman developed a German accent after being hit by bomb shrapnel in 1941. Neighbors suspected she was a spy. Several dozen cases have been documented worldwide. Victims are often accused of faking the condition, but it generally follows a stroke or head trauma and may be due to damage to a speech center in the brain that changes the speed, pitch, stress and pronunciation of words. The perception that the strange speech pattern is a foreign accent lies "in the ear of the beholder," according to researchers in Belgium. When they asked 33 students to place the accent of one FAS patient, they got 10 different answers, ranging from Turkish to Romanian.
Intermittent explosive disorder. As many as 1 in 14 people (mostly men) have angry, aggressive or violent outbursts, way out of proportion to situations, as in road rage and domestic abuse. Episodes generally last from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, may be accompanied by chest tightness or heart palpitations and are often followed by embarrassment or remorse. Experts think IED may involve an imbalance of serotonin and testosterone, and it tends to run in families, though it may be as much environmental as genetic: People raised in violent homes seem particularly prone to it.
Alien hand syndrome. Fans of "Dr. Strangelove" will recall the title character's inability to control his right hand, which kept trying to give a Nazi salute. Real-life sufferers of AHS (only a few dozen to date) lose conscious control of a limb, probably due to a lost connection between brain hemispheres. The "alien" hand may thwart what the other hand is doing, such as unbuttoning a shirt the other hand is buttoning, or tamping out a cigarette the other hand has just lit. Symptoms can be managed by keeping the rogue hand preoccupied by giving it an object to hold or by muffling it with an oven mitt.
Capgras delusion. The conviction that a close friend or family member is an impostor was named for the French psychiatrist who first described it in 1923. Experts now think it stems from a disconnect between the regions of the brain that perceive faces and register emotional responses. About one-third of people with dementia have Capgras at some point. A related disorder, Cotard's Delusion, causes sufferers to think they are dead, decaying or never existed at all. Both disorders have formed the plots of novels, TV shows and movies, from an episode of "Scrubs" to the new film "Synecdoche." Antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy sometimes help.
Spasmodic dysphonia. The inability to speak except in rhymes, whispers or a falsetto voice may seem like a gag worthy of "Dilbert." But the comic strip's creator, Scott Adams, is among some 30,000 Americans who have SD, in which spasms prevent the vocal cords from vibrating normally. Botox injections around the larynx can calm the spasms temporarily. The condition seems to vanish when sufferers sing, recite poetry or change the tenor of their voice. Adams read nursery rhymes aloud every night in an effort to "remap" his brain and was able to recover much of his speaking ability.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Named after Lewis Carroll's famous novel, this neurological condition makes objects (including one's own body parts) seem smaller, larger, closer or more distant than they really are. It's more common in childhood, often at the onset of sleep, and may disappear by adulthood. The prevalence and origin are unknown, but it sometimes accompanies migraine headaches, epilepsy, brain tumors or the use of psychotropic drugs.