A recent study conducted at the Children’s Hospital Boston has concluded that the brain activity recorded on MRI scans even before a child actually learns to read could provide an early diagnostic marker for Dyslexia. It has been found that children at risk for Dyslexia have significant differences in brain activity that can be captured through MRI scans even before the child is capable of picking up his first lessons.
Now, developmental Dyslexia responds to medical treatment faster and since the disease affects 5 to 17% percent of all children, the findings of this study are significantly important as far as developmental dyslexia treatments are concerned. Did you know that 50% of all children with a family history of dyslexia to have significant difficulties in recognizing and pronouncing words fluently? That is shockingly true and if you add the probabilities of the 5 to 17% of the child population having dyslexia, the total number of children with dyslexia across the country at any given point in time would be huge.
For the uninitiated, children suffering from dyslexia have difficulty mapping sounds to written language and although different treatments are available, they don’t come with their due share of side effects and some of those medications can even worsen the problem. However, developmental Dyslexia is much easier to treat and responds faster to treatment – all that is needed is an early MRI scan of the brain of the child at the preschool stage.
This research study was led by Nora Raschle, PhD, at the Children’s Hospital Boston and a total of 30 preschool children participated in the study with an average age of 5.5 years. In this study, the subjects were required to decide on whether or not two different words started with the same speech sounds and they were then subjected to MRI scans and the hospital staff followed an elaborate protocol to make sure that the young children were still inside the MRI scanner.
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