The teenager has temporarily forgot to speak Dutch after routine knee surgery and is an example of a rare condition called foreign language syndrome.
A 17 -year -old boy in the Netherlands starred in a bizarre and extremely rare medical phenomenon after undergoing knee surgery. When you woke up from anesthesia, I couldn’t speak or understand Down – Your mother tongue – and instead spoke exclusively in English.
The case, documented in one, is one of the few examples of a condition known as Foreign Language Syndrome (SLE), which was reported only a few times in the medical literature.
The teenager had been hospitalized for a knee routine surgeryfollowing a football injury. The operation went well, but when he recovered his conscience, he insisted that he was in the United States and spoke only English, a language he once used only at school. He did not recognize his parents and failed to communicate in Dutch, which alarmed the hospital staff.
Initially, a nurse suspected that the boy was suffering from emergency delirium, a temporary state of confusion that may occur after anesthesia. However, when several hours later the young man could not speak Dutch, doctors called a psychiatric team for evaluation.
Despite the linguistic confusion, the teenager looked calm and attentive. He answered the questions fluently in English, although with Dutch accent. After a while, he tried to answer in Dutch, but had difficulties. A neurologist took a complete exam and did not find any anomalies.
After 18 hours, he recovered his ability to understand the Dutch, but he could not speak yet. However, when friends visited him the next day, he suddenly recovered full use of your mother tongue. Given their rapid recovery, doctors considered more unnecessary neurological tests and discharged him three days after surgery, explains the.
SLE is an extremely rare disease, with only nine cases recorded in the medical literature. Most reported cases involve white men who unexpectedly change from their mother tongue to another they learned later.
SLE is often compared to foreign accent syndrome, where individuals develop a speech pattern that makes them seem like they are talk to a foreign accentoften in the sequence of brain injuries.
However, SFL’s exact cause remains a mystery. Some investigators suspect that the effects of anesthesia on cognition may trigger the disease, but are not sure whether it should be classified as a distinct disease or as a variation of emergency delirium.
