CHICAGO - Instead of waiting for a child to
experience reading delays, scientists now say they can identify the reading
problem even before children start school, long before they become labeled as
poor students and begin to lose confidence in themselves.
Although typically diagnosed during the second
or third grade of school - around age 7 or 8 - a team from Children's Hospital
Boston said they could see signs of the disease on brain scans in children as
early as 4 and 5, a time when studies show children are best able to respond to
interventions.
"We call it the dyslexia paradox,"
said Nadine Gaab of the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Children's,
whose study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Gaab said most children are not diagnosed
until third grade, but interventions work best in younger children, hopefully
before they begin to learn to read.
"Often, by the time they get a diagnosis,
they usually have experienced three years of peers telling them they are
stupid, parents telling them they are lazy. We know they have reduced self
esteem. They are really struggling," Gaab said in a telephone interview.
Her study builds on an emerging understanding
of dyslexia as a problem with recognizing and manipulating the individual
sounds that form language, which is known as phonological processing.
In order to read, children must map the sounds
of spoken language onto specific letters that make up words.
Children with dyslexia struggle with this mapping
process.
"The beauty is spoken language can
present before written language so people can look for symptoms," said Dr.
Sally Shaywitz, a director of the Center for Dyslexia and Creativity at Yale
University.
Signs of early dyslexia might include difficulty
with rhyming, mispronouncing words or confusing similar-sounding words.
"Those are all very early symptoms,"
Shaywitz said. Dyslexia affects roughly 5 per cent to 17 per cent of all
children and up to 1 in 2 children with a family history of the disorder will
struggle with reading, have poor spelling and experience difficulty decoding
words.
In her study, Gaab and colleagues scanned the
brains of 36 preschool children while they did a number of tasks, such as
trying to decide if two words start with the same sound.
They found that during these tasks, children
who had a family history of dyslexia had less brain activity in certain regions
of the brain than did children of similar ages, intelligence and socioeconomic
status.
Older children and adults with dyslexia have
dysfunction in these same areas of the brain, which include the junctions
between the occipital and temporal lobes and the temporal and parietal lobes in
the back of the brain.
Gaab said the study shows that when children
predisposed to dyslexia did these tasks, their brains did not use the area
typically used for processing this information.
This problem occurred even before the children
started learning to read.
"The important point of this paper is it
shows the need to look for signs of dyslexia earlier," said April
Benasich, director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research at Rutgers,
the State University of New Jersey, who was not part of the study.
Benasich studies language processing in even
younger children - babies who have a family history of learning disorders.
"There is evidence to suggest that what
is thought to be reading failure is there before the kids fail," she said.
Gaab said her study is too small to form the
basis of any test for dyslexia but her team has just won a grant from the
National Institutes of Health to do a larger study.
Ultimately, she hopes parents will be able to
go to their pediatrician and ask for their child to be assessed.
"Families often know that their child has
dyslexia as early as kindergarten, but they can't get interventions at their
schools," she said in a statement.
"If we can show that we can identify
these kids early, schools may be encouraged to develop programs," she
said.
Reuters
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