Children suffering from dyslexia go undiagnosed for many years, which lead to protracted learning difficulties and children become angry and frustrated at school. Dyslexia affects about five to seventeen percent of all children and up to fifty percent of children with family history of the condition, struggle with reading, have poor spelling and experience difficulty decoding words.
Usually dyslexia is not identified until the age of seven or eight and children do not exhibit real problem with their reading. But now researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston claim that they could spot signs of the condition on brain scans in children as young as the age of four and five years.
Studies also show that this age is when children are most capable to respond to intercessions. The latest study will allow worried parents to check if their children show signs of dyslexia when they are four or five years old. The early signs of dyslexia may include difficulty with rhyming, mispronouncing words or confusing similar-sounding words.
Nadine Gaab and colleagues from the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at the hospital scanned the brains of thirty-six pre-school children, when they did a number of tasks like trying to decide if two words start with the same sound. 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.
They found that during these tasks, children who with family history of dyslexia had less brain activity in certain regions of the brain. Older children and adults suffering 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.
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. Most children are not diagnosed until they exhibit problems reading, but helping children with dyslexia works best if you start before they even 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 and they had reduced self esteem. They are really struggling, added Gaab. She hopes parents will be able to go to their pediatrician and ask for their child to be assessed. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.