Source: PR Newswire
BOSTON, Jan. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Children at risk for dyslexia show differences in brain activity on MRI scans even before they begin learning to read, finds a study at Children’s Hospital Boston. Since developmental dyslexia responds to early intervention, diagnosing children at risk before or during kindergarten could head off difficulties and frustration in school, the researchers say. Findings appear this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Developmental dyslexia (dyslexia that’s not caused by brain trauma) affects 5 to 17 percent of all children; up to 1 in 2 children with a family history of dyslexia will struggle with reading themselves, experiencing poor spelling and decoding abilities and difficulties with fluent word recognition. Because of problems recognizing and manipulating the underlying sound structures of words (known as phonological processing), children with dyslexia have difficulty mapping oral sounds to written language.
Cartoon by Bob Moran
