Wendi Upchurch is keen to ensure her son Mac doesn t struggle more than he already has to. The eleven-year-old gets special tuition and attends a school which specialises in helping children with reading problems. Children have a short critical period during which to absorb and language and reading. Any shortcomings can cause them much bigger problems in later life. The Dyslexia Research Trust says everyone s experience of dyslexia is different and everyone is affected to a greater or lesser degree. It has nothing to do with IQ which may or may not be high or with spoken communication. The Trust says developmental dyslexia is a genetic impairment often inherited and it appears to affect boys more than girls. Wendi Upchurch says all the tutoring and her son s hard work is paying off. It is predicted he will eventually accomplish average reading skills. If his disability was more severe she says she would have wanted to know about it sooner so that she could take action earlier. Upchurch says to her son If I knew that your reading skills were not going to improve I think we would have to really start relying a lot more on technology and try to figure out how we were going to make it work. According to scientists at Stanford University this brain-based reading disability affects up to seventeen per cent of American children affected by dyslexia. It is known that the brain of some of these youngsters learns to compensate for the disability and like Mac Upchurch they can catch up. The difficulty has been predicting and isolating the children whose brains can learn to compensate. Here at the University s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences a team led by Fumiko Hoeft is using fMRI scanners to calculate which children will or won t improve without the support of educational and medical professionals. Hoeft says using these brain imaging methods we were able to predict with over 90 percent accuracy which child would learn to compensate on a one-to-one basis. According to Hoeft being able to do this is important because we can look at their brain patterns and say Oh maybe you will be most suited for this intervention maybe you will most suited for this other intervention and we might be able to one day individualise interventions. A specialised programme meeting the specific needs of every child struggling with dyslexia is still a long way off. But Hoeft s work connecting brain activity with dyslexia might mean that in the future more children have an opportunity to reach their potential. The team says many children with dyslexia are highly intelligent grow up in supportive environments and have adequate schooling but they still have trouble making sense of what s on the page. Dr. Hoeft s study monitored brain activity to show which region of the brain participants were using while they performed a reading-related task. They also used Diffusion Tensor Imaging DTI to look at the fibres connecting different parts of the b

• published: 05 Nov 2013
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