By Bruce Bower A gene variant involved in brain development may contribute to reading problems, including dyslexia. Unlike speaking, reading is a thoroughly unnatural act. That doesn’t mean that biology has no role in literacy. A gene involved in early brain development influences a range of reading problems, including dyslexia, a new study published online October 1 in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests. British children ages 7 to 9 who inherited a particular genetic sequence on chromosome 6 tended to perform poorly on tests of reading and spelling abilities, whether or not they had already been classified as dyslexic, say geneticist Silvia Paracchini of the University of Oxford in England and her colleagues. On average, carriers of the key genetic sequence scored as well on IQ tests as other kids did. In an earlier report, the scientists found that the DNA sequence spans part of a gene called KIAA0319 and is linked to dyslexia in children in England and the United States. Paracchini’s group has also shown that the chromosome 6 sequence often accompanies a reduced ability of the KIAA0319 gene to direct the prenatal migration of brain cells to appropriate destinations. Decreased protein production by KIAA0319 prompts subtle brain changes, beginning before birth, that contribute to reading problems, including dyslexia, the researchers propose. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

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Using new software developed to investigate how the brains of dyslexic children are organized, University of Washington researchers have found that key areas for language and working memory involved in reading are connected differently in dyslexics than in children who are good readers and spellers. However, once the children with dyslexia received a three-week instructional program, their patterns of functional brain connectivity normalized and were similar to those of good readers when deciding if sounds went with groups of letters in words. “Some brain regions are too strongly connected functionally in children with dyslexia when they are deciding which sounds go with which letters,” said Todd Richards, a UW neuroimaging scientist and lead author of a study published in the current issue of the Journal of Neurolinguistics. “We had hints in previous studies that the ability to decode novel words improves when a specific brain region in the right hemisphere decreases in activation. This study suggests that the deactivation may result in a disconnection in time from the comparable region in the left hemisphere, which in turn leads to improved reading. Reading requires sequential as well as simultaneous processes.” Richards and co-author Virginia Berninger, a neuropsychologist, said temporal connectivity, or the ability of different parts of the brain to “talk” with each other at the same time or in sequence, is a key in overcoming dyslexia. Berninger, who directs the UW’s Learning Disabilities Center, compared dyslexia to an orchestra playing with an ineffective conductor who does not keep all the musicians playing in synchrony with each other.

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LONDON By health-newswire.com reporters The effectiveness of a simple “breath test” that may be able to identify children with dyslexia and determine whether they are benefiting from treatment is to be studied by UK researchers. The breath test, developed by scientists from the University of Oxford, works by measuring biochemical imbalances in the body that are thought to underlie some behavioural and learning difficulties. The development of the test follows research by Dr Alexandra Richardson, of the university’s Department of Physiology, who found that some people with conditions such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder can be treated with a simple nutritional supplement. © Health Media Group 2002 Terms and Conditions

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By Katherine Harmon Chinese dyslexia may be much more complex than the English variety, according to a new paper published online today in Current Biology. English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don't have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds. What about languages based on full-word characters rather than sound-carrying letters? Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception. The pronunciation of detailed and complex Chinese characters must be memorized, rather than sounded out like words in alphabet-based languages. That requirement led researchers to suspect that disabilities in the visual realm might come into play in dyslexia in that language. "A fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be preformed by the visual system in order to activate the characters' phonological and semantic information," said lead author Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong, in a prepared statement. To see whether Chinese dyslexics had trouble comprehending visual details, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 12 Chinese children with dyslexia. When asked to complete a task that involved visually judging size, the dyslexic children had less activation in an area of the brain that is charged with visual-spatial processing (the left intraparietal sulcus) than did Chinese children with normal reading levels. Previous research had also shown that the dyslexic group had weak activation in areas that process phonological information (the left middle frontal gyrus) when tested with a rhyming task. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

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Randolph E. Schmid -- Dyslexia affects different parts of children's brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures. "This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics' brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese," said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. "Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia." Millions of children worldwide are affected by dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that can include problems in reading, spelling, writing and pronouncing words. The International Dyslexia Association says there is no consensus on the exact number because not all children are screened, but estimates range from 8 percent to 15 percent of students. Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words. Past studies have suggested that the brain may use different networks of neurons in different languages, but none has suggested a difference in the structural parts of the brain involved, Tan explained. © 2008 Discovery Communications

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Symptoms, like difficultly sounding out words, make dyslexia readily detectable. But the causes of the disability are still hard to pinpoint. "Why? What causes these otherwise very bright children to struggle to read?" asks pediatrician Sally Shaywitz, co-director of Yale University's Center for the Study of Learning and Attention, and the author of "Overcoming Dyslexia." "Dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty first in learning to read, and then in having to struggle to read," she explains. "That means the person who is dyslexic has all the factors present that say, 'This person should be a good reader. They're intelligent, they're motivated, and they've had good education. Yet they still struggle to read." If left untreated, childhood dyslexia becomes an adult problem. "It's not something that's outgrown," says neurophysiologist Lynn Flowers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. "Ten percent of the child and therefore the adult population is affected by dyslexia to some degree," she says. "It isn't an all or nothing kind of disorder, it comes in shades as well." © ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

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Genetic variations that cause miscues in brain development may play an important role in dyslexia, according to new research presented last week at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Salt Lake City. People with dyslexia have reading impairments despite normal intelligence. The problem affects between 5% and 17% of the population. In the last few years, geneticists have begun to point the finger at particular genes (ScienceNOW, 22 February). However, little is known about how these genes might contribute to the condition. In one new study, a collaboration of 20 researchers led by Haiying Meng and Jeffrey Gruen of Yale University School of Medicine homed in on a region of chromosome 6 that has been implicated in previous dyslexia studies. Using DNA collected from 536 people with a dyslexic in their families, the researchers tracked 147 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), places where the genetic code differs by one letter in different people. Searching for SNPs that tend to have one "spelling" in people with reading impairments and another spelling in normal readers, the researchers found that a disproportionate number of such SNPs showed up in a gene called DCDC2. © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Scientists have homed in on a gene that might be involved in dyslexia, a condition that causes difficulty with reading and spelling. The gene has appeared as a suspect before, and researchers hope that the new findings will help them better understand what happens in the brains of people with this condition, as well as provide insights into the workings of language. Dyslexia afflicts up to 10% of the population, and although those individuals have trouble with reading and spelling, they often have normal or even above-average intelligence. They also use slightly different parts of their brains than the average person does when reading and writing. The condition seems to be at least partly inherited, but it has been a challenge to find any of the genes involved, which are most likely scattered across several chromosomes. Now, researchers believe that they are one step closer to fingering a possible culprit. Natalie Cope and Julie Williams of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom and their colleagues studied 223 people with dyslexia, as well as their families and 273 controls. The team reports in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics that those with dyslexia had a strong tendency to carry alterations in KIAA0319, a gene on chromosome 6p. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Dyslexia can impair a driver's reactions as much as a moderate drinking session. That is the conclusion of a small study which compared how quickly dyslexic and non-dyslexic drivers react to traffic signs. Those with dyslexia, which is characterised by difficulties with reading and writing, took on average 30% longer to react. The controversial finding will raise questions about whether people with dyslexia should have extra tests before being allowed behind the wheel. Drivers just over the UK's alcohol limit, which can be exceeded by drinking two pints of beer, are typically 10% slower than normal to react. In the study, Hermundur Sigmundsson at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim gave 17 volunteers, six of whom were dyslexic, two different tests. The first involved a 4-minute drive along a simulated country road at 50 to 80 kilometres per hour. In the second task, the volunteers drove through a city at lower speeds for 10 minutes. The simulator flashed up traffic signs in the drivers' field of view and measured how quickly they responded by pushing a button or saying "now". In the rural drive, the signs appeared directly ahead, while in the city they appeared in a variety of places. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

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Helen Pilcher There is no one cause for dyslexia: rather, the causes vary between languages. So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts1. The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another. The team also hopes the work will aid the design of culturally specific strategies for learning to read and write that could benefit everyone. People with dyslexia often find it difficult to recognize and understand words. Speakers of alphabetic languages, such as English or Russian, can have a problem converting letters into sounds. Dyslexics in these languages have reduced activity in a brain region called the left temporoparietal cortex. But Chinese readers must learn the meanings of around 5,000 different characters, each corresponding to a word. Instead of letter-to-sound conversion problems, Chinese dyslexics have difficulties extrapolating from a symbol's shape to its sound and meaning. ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

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By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA With 6,000 characters to memorize, Westerners shudder at the idea reading even the most basic street signs and instructions in Chinese. A new set of brain images shows why: Reading English-style alphabets and Chinese characters use very different parts of the brain. The results also suggest that Chinese schoolchildren with reading problems misfire in a different brain region than the one used in reading alphabet-based languages like English. This demonstrates that the learning disorder dyslexia is not the same in every culture and does not have a universal biological cause, researchers said. An image taken from TV shows a soldier rushing a girl away from the school in Beslan, in the region of North Ossetia. The guerrillas attacked on the first day of the school year. (Reuters Television) Neurologists described the results as "very important and innovative." While dyslexia has certain common roots, they said they now have some proof that this kind of functional problem plays out differently according to the unique demands that Western and Eastern languages place on the brain's wiring and processing centers. © 2004 The Associated Press

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Bruce Bower A new brain-imaging study indicates that a specially designed program for second and third graders deficient in reading boosts their reading skills while prodding their brains to respond to written material in the same way that the brains of good readers do. The same investigation found that the remedial instruction typically offered to poor readers in the nation's schools doesn't improve their skills and fails to ignite activity in brain areas that have been linked to effective reading. "Good teaching can change the brain in a way that has the potential to benefit struggling readers," says pediatrician Sally Shaywitz of Yale University School of Medicine. At least one in five U.S. grade-schoolers with average or above-average intelligence encounters severe difficulties in learning to read, researchers estimate. In 2000, a panel of educators and scientists convened by Congress concluded that reading disability stems primarily from difficulties in recognizing the correspondence between speech sounds and letters. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

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Bruce Bower For the first time, scientists have identified a gene that appears to influence the development of at least some cases of dyslexia. This learning disorder is characterized by difficulties in perceiving sounds within words, spelling and reading problems, and troubles with written and oral expression. It's estimated that dyslexia affects at least 1 in 25 people. Although scientists are investigating dyslexia's suspected neural roots (SN: 5/24/03, p. 324: http://www.sciencenews.org/20030524/fob4.asp), the condition's causes remain unknown. If confirmed in further studies, the new genetic finding represents a major step forward for dyslexia researchers. Until now, investigators have only been able to link dyslexia to alterations along stretches of DNA containing tens or hundreds of genes. The most prominent of these genetic segments are located on chromosomes 6 and 15. Copyright ©2003 Science Service.

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For the 10 to 15 percent of school-aged children in the U.S. who suffer from dyslexia, the written word often feels like an insurmountable obstacle. But a spate of research is helping scientists get to the root of the condition and suggest new methods of treatment. Research published today in the journal Neurology suggests that some therapies can make a difference quickly. Scientists report that dyslexic children showed normal brain activation patterns during reading tests after just three weeks of specialized instruction. Elizabeth Aylward of the University of Washington and her colleagues tested 10 children who suffered from dyslexia and scored 30 percent below average on standardized reading tests despite having above average intelligence and 11 children classified as good readers. © 1996-2003 Scientific American, Inc.

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Gene hint to human reading ability. HELEN PEARSON A Finnish family has given the first clear clue to a gene involved in dyslexia. Between 5 and 15% of people are dyslexic. They have problems reading, writing and spelling. Although scientists have suspected that genes are involved, they had not come up with a convincing candidate - until now. One gene is mutated in around 10% of Finnish dyslexics, compared with 2-3% in the rest of the population, Juha Kere of the University of Helsinki, Finland and his team found. "If you have the gene you become more susceptible, but you're not necessarily dyslexic," he says. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

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BY ROBYN SURIANO The Orlando Sentinel - Mariel Segovia changes from her stylish denim jacket and black jeans into drab, green hospital scrubs and climbs onto a table for a brain scan. The Neuroimaging machine is pulled into place, swallowing most of the 10-year-old's head like a giant helmet. The $1.8 million device is so sensitive that the metal buttons on Mariel's jeans would disrupt the machine. Any body movement - even blinking - is also bad for the machine. So Mariel is lying still with her hands clasped on her chest, eyes focused on a computerlike screen hanging above her. This is not a medical test, and Mariel is not a patient. The healthy fifth-grader with a sister, brother and a trampoline at her Texas home is helping research that could revolutionize the way reading is taught in America. © 2002, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

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Copyright © 2002 AP Online The Associated Press - Scientists have found new evidence linking the reading problem called dyslexia to glitches in a particular region of the brain. The evidence comes from brain scans of 70 dyslexic and 74 non-impaired children, ages 7 to 18. It follows a 1998 brain scan study that reported the link in adults. The new work, by including children as young as 7, shows the brain problem is present at the beginning of reading ability, said researcher Sally Shaywitz of Yale University. Copyright © 2001 Nando Media

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FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond the limitations of dyslexia. By Betsy Morris Consider the following four dead-end kids. One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude. He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial English and came perilously close to flunking out of college. The third feared he'd never make it through school--and might not have without a tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade, devouring Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help him untangle the words. These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson developed one of Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic Airways. Schwab virtually created the discount brokerage business. Chambers is CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated trial attorney, best known as the guy who beat Microsoft. © Copyright 2002 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

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Missile-tracking technology may spot symptoms of learning impairment. VIRGINIA GEWIN Eye-tracking glasses developed to reduce fighter pilots' workload by enabling their eyes to direct weapons could help to diagnose dyslexia. Qinetiq, part of the British government's former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, has just received a grant to create child-size prototype glasses. Some scientists think that eye movements offer clues as to why dyslexics struggle to read and write. Dyslexia affects between five and ten per cent of the world's population. "Many of the problems are due to failure of the eyes to remain steady when they're trying to take in the visual form of words," says dyslexia researcher John Stein of the University of Oxford, who is working with Qinetiq. Until now, he says, "we've lacked a means of measuring eye movements accurately". © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002

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A 10-minute screening test to identify pre-school children who might be dyslexic has been developed by language experts at University College London. The test will be used by children from the age of three and a half upwards, says Professor Heather van der Lely. But Dr John Rack of Dyslexia Action urged caution about the risk of "false alarms" from short screening tests. Dyslexia is a condition that can cause difficulty with reading, writing and spelling. The test has been developed by Professor van der Lely, who is director of the UCL Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience. What makes this test different is that it can be carried out in only 10 minutes - and that it can be used before children are usually able to read, picking up any potential concerns before children have started full-time education. Professor van der Lely, speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, said that the test, which asks a child to repeat sentences and re-tell a story, can help with early intervention. (C)BBC

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