A woman in the U.K. is blaming an MRI scan for amplifying her chronic headaches and causing her to speak with various accents.
Michaela Armer, age 47, lost her Lancashire accent but gained various foreign accents, including Chinese, Filipino, South African, Italian, Polish, and French, that seem to randomly appear, according to a July 17 report in the Mirror.
The condition is called foreign accent syndrome and prompts a person to speak in a different accent. It can be caused by a neurological disorder, such as a stroke or head trauma.
After an MRI scan in May 2015, Armer claims she also has struggled to say her name, and she regained her speech through therapeutic singing, which helped her practice saying vowels, according to the report.
Armer added that she has been in and out of the hospital for the last two years, cannot drive anymore, and has experienced other physical conditions that prohibit her from walking distances and also functional tremors.
The Mirror article also quoted Nick Miller, a professor of motor speech disorders at Newcastle University, as saying an MRI scan cannot cause foreign accent syndrome, likening it to an x-ray causing a broken arm.
