Definition:
Dyslexia is a disorder occurs in children. It is a learning disorder characterized by difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words. Also called specific reading disability, dyslexia is a common learning disability in children
Dyslexia, also known as reading disorder, is characterized by trouble with reading despite normal intelligence. Different people are affected to varying degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, “sounding out” words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads. Often these difficulties are first noticed at school. When someone who previously could read loses their ability, it is known as alexia. The difficulties are involuntary and people with this disorder have normal desire to learn…………..CLICK & SEE THE PICTURES
It occurs in children with normal vision and intelligence. Sometimes dyslexia goes undiagnosed for years and isn’t recognized until adulthood.
Dyslexia is the most common learning disability, affecting 3–7 % of the population; however, up to 20% may have some degree of symptoms. While dyslexia is more often diagnosed in men, it has been suggested that it affects men and women equally. Dyslexia occurs in all areas of the world. Some believe that dyslexia should be best considered as a different way of learning, with both benefits and downsides.
There’s no cure for dyslexia. It’s a lifelong condition caused by inherited traits that affect how our brain works. However, most children with dyslexia can succeed in school with tutoring or a specialized education program. Emotional support also plays an important role.
Symptoms:
It is very difficult to recognize dysplexia before the child enters school, but some early clues may indicate a problem. Once the child reaches school age, the school teacher may be the first to notice a problem. The condition often becomes apparent as a child starts learning to read.
Symptoms found before school age:
Signs and symptoms that a young child may be at risk of dyslexia include:
*Late talking
*Learning new words slowly
*Difficulty learning nursery rhymes
*Difficulty playing rhyming games
Symptoms found at the school age:
Once the child is in school, dyslexia signs and symptoms may become more apparent, including:
*Reading well below the expected level than the child’s age
*Problems processing and understanding what he or she hears
*Difficulty comprehending rapid instructions
*Problems remembering the sequence of things
*Difficulty seeing (and occasionally hearing) similarities and differences in letters and words
*Inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word
*Difficulty spelling
*Trouble learning a foreign language
Symptoms found in teens and adults:
The symptoms are similar to those in children. Though early intervention is beneficial for dyslexia treatment, it’s never too late to seek help. Some common dyslexia symptoms in teens and adults are :
* Difficulties with summarizing stories
* Difficulty with memorization, reading aloud.
*Difficulty in learning foreign languages.
*Difficulty with time management
*Trouble learning a foreign language
*Difficulty memorizing
*Difficulty doing math problems
Adult dyslexics can often read with good comprehension, though they tend to read more slowly than non-dyslexics and perform worse in spelling tests or when reading nonsense words – a measure of phonological awareness.
A common myth about dyslexia is that its defining feature is reading or writing letters or words backwards, but this is true of many children as they learn to read and write
Associated conditions:
Dyslexia is often accompanied by several learning disabilities, but it is unclear whether they share underlying neurological causes. These associated disabilities include:
*Dysgraphia – A disorder which primarily expresses itself through difficulties with writing or typing, but in some cases through difficulties associated with eye–hand coordination and direction- or sequence-oriented processes such as tying knots or carrying out repetitive tasks. In dyslexia, dysgraphia is often multifactorial, due to impaired letter-writing automaticity, organizational and elaborative difficulties, and impaired visual word forming which makes it more difficult to retrieve the visual picture of words required for spelling.
*Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – A significant degree of comorbidity has been reported between ADHD and reading disorders such as dyslexia. ADHD occurs in 12–24% of all individuals with dyslexia.
*Auditory processing disorder – A listening disability that affects the ability to process auditory information. This can lead to problems with auditory memory and auditory sequencing. Many people with dyslexia have auditory processing problems, and may develop their own logographic cues to compensate for this type of deficit. Some research indicates that auditory processing skills could be the primary shortfall in dyslexia.
*Developmental coordination disorder – A neurological condition characterized by marked difficulty in carrying out routine tasks involving balance, fine-motor control, kinesthetic coordination, difficulty in the use of speech sounds, problems with short-term memory, and organization.
Causes:
Researchers have been trying to find the neurobiological basis of dyslexia since the condition was first identified in 1881. For example, some have tried to associate the common problem among dyslexics of not being able to see letters clearly to abnormal development of their visual nerve cells.
Dyslexia has been linked to certain genes that control how the brain develops. It appears to be an inherited condition — it tends to run in families.
These inherited traits appear to affect parts of the brain concerned with language, interfering with the ability to convert written letters and words into speech.
Neuroanatomy:
Modern neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) have shown a correlation between both functional and structural differences in the brains of children with reading difficulties. Some dyslexics show less electrical activation in parts of the left hemisphere of the brain involved with reading, such as the inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and the middle and ventral temporal cortex. Over the past decade, brain activation studies using PET to study language have produced a breakthrough in the understanding of the neural basis of language. Neural bases for the visual lexicon and for auditory verbal short-term memory components have been proposed, with some implication that the observed neural manifestation of developmental dyslexia is task-specific (i.e. functional rather than structural). fMRIs in dyslexics have provided important data which point to the interactive role of the cerebellum and cerebral cortex as well as other brain structures.
The cerebellar theory of dyslexia proposes that impairment of cerebellum-controlled muscle movement affects the formation of words by the tongue and facial muscles, resulting in the fluency problems that are characteristic of some dyslexics. The cerebellum is also involved in the automatization of some tasks, such as reading.[48] The fact that some dyslexic children have motor task and balance impairments has been used as evidence for a cerebellar role in their reading difficulties. However, the cerebellar theory is not supported by controlled research studies
Genetics:
Research into potential genetic causes of dyslexia has its roots in post-autopsy examination of the brains of people with dyslexia. Observed anatomical differences in the language centers of such brains include microscopic cortical malformations known as ectopias, more rarely, vascular micro-malformations, and microgyrus. The previously cited studies and others[51] suggest that abnormal cortical development presumed to occur before or during the sixth month of fetal brain development was the cause of the abnormalities. Abnormal cell formations in dyslexics have also been reported in non-language cerebral and subcortical brain structures. Several genes have been associated with dyslexia, including DCDC2 and KIAA0319 on chromosome 6, and DYX1C1 on chromosome 15
Mechanisms:
The dual-route theory of reading aloud was first described in the early 1970s. This theory suggests that two separate mental mechanisms, or cognitive routes, are involved in reading aloud. One mechanism is the lexical route, which is the process whereby skilled readers can recognize known words by sight alone, through a “dictionary” lookup procedure. The other mechanism is the nonlexical or sublexical route, which is the process whereby the reader can “sound out” a written word. This is done by identifying the word’s constituent parts (letters, phonemes, graphemes) and applying knowledge of how these parts are associated with each other, for example, how a string of neighboring letters sound together. The dual-route system could explain the different rates of dyslexia occurrence between different languages (e.g. the Spanish language dependence on phonological rules accounts for the fact that Spanish-speaking children show a higher level of performance in non-word reading, when compared to English-speakers).
Dyslexia disorder is not caused by mutation in one gene; in fact, it appears to involve the combined effects of several genes. Studying the cognitive problems associated with other disorders helps to better understand the genotype-phenotype link of dyslexia. Neurophysiological and imaging procedures are being used to ascertain phenotypic characteristics in dyslexics, thus identifying the effects of certain genes.
Diagnosis:
There’s no one test that can diagnose dyslexia. Your child’s doctor will consider a number of factors, such as:
*Child’s mental development, educational issues and medical history.
The doctor will likely ask the chil questions about these areas. The doctor will likely also want to know about any conditions that run in your child’s family, including whether any family members have a learning disability.
*Child’s home life.
The doctor may ask for a description of hi or her family and home life, including who lives at home and whether there are any problems at home.
*Questionnaires.
The child’s doctor may have the child, family members or teachers answer written questions. Child may be asked to take tests to identify reading and language abilities.
Vision, hearing and brain (neurological) tests. These can help determine whether another disorder may be causing or adding to the child’s poor reading ability………....CLICK & SEE
*Psychological testing.
The doctor may ask the parent or child questions to better understand the child’s psychological state. This can help determine whether social problems, anxiety or depression may be limiting his or her abilities.
*Testing reading and other academic skills.
Child may take a set of educational tests and have the process and quality of reading skills analyzed by a reading expert.
Treatment & Management:
There’s no known way to correct the underlying brain abnormality that causes dyslexia — dyslexia is a lifelong problem. However, early detection and evaluation to determine specific needs and appropriate treatment can improve success.
Through the use of compensation strategies, therapy and educational support, dyslexic individuals can learn to read and write. There are techniques and technical aids which help to manage or conceal symptoms of the disorder. Removing stress and anxiety alone can sometimes improve written comprehension. For dyslexia intervention with alphabet-writing systems, the fundamental aim is to increase a child’s awareness of correspondences between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds), and to relate these to reading and spelling by teaching how sounds blend into words. It has been found that reinforced collateral training focused on reading and spelling yields longer-lasting gains than oral phonological training alone. Early intervention – that done while the language areas of the brain are still developing – is the most successful in reducing the long-term impacts of dyslexia. There is some evidence that the use of specially-tailored fonts may mitigate the effects of dyslexia. These fonts, which include Dyslexie, OpenDyslexic, and Lexia Readable, were created based on the idea that many of the letters of the Latin alphabet are visually similar and may therefore confuse dyslexics. Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic both put emphasis on making each letter more unique in order to be more easily identified. Font design can have an effect on reading, reading time, and the perception of legibility of all readers, not only those with dyslexia.
There have been many studies conducted regarding intervention in dyslexia. Among these studies one meta-analysis found that there was functional activation as a result.
Alternative therapy: Regular practice of Yaga with Pramayama under the supervision of an expart may give very good result in improving neurogical difficulties.
Prognosis:
The prognosis for children with dyslexia is variable and dependent on the cause. In the case of primary dyslexia, the earlier the diagnosis is made and intervention started, the better the outcome. It is also important to focus on the child’s self-esteem, since dealing with dyslexia can be extremely frustrating.
Dyslexic children require special instruction for word analysis and spelling from an early age. However, there are fonts that can help dyslexics better understand writing. The prognosis, generally speaking, is positive for individuals who are identified in childhood and receive support from friends and family.
Lastly it is important to recognize that many well-known and successful individuals have suffered from dyslexia, including Albert Einstein and Steven Spielberg, just to name a couple.
Disclaimer: This information is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advise or help. It is always best to consult with a Physician about serious health concerns. This information is in no way intended to diagnose or prescribe remedies.This is purely for educational purpose.
Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dyslexia
http://www.medicinenet.com/dyslexia/page6.htm#what_is_the_prognosis_for_a_person_with_dyslexia
