BRAIN SCANS FORECAST READING DIFFICULTIES
Uc San Francisco researchers have used brain scans to predict how young
children learn to read, giving clinicians a possible tool to spot children with
dyslexia and other reading difficulties before they experience reading
challenges.
In the United
States, children usually learn to read for the first time in kindergarten and
become proficient readers by third grade, according to the authors. In the
study, researchers examined brain scans of 38 kindergarteners as they were
learning to read formally at school and tracked their white matter development
until third grade. The brain's white matter is essential for perceiving,
thinking and learning.
The researchers
found that the developmental course of the children's white matter volume predicted
the kindergarteners' abilities to read.
"We show that
white matter development during a critical period in a child's life, when they
start school and learn to read for the very first time, predicts how well the
child ends up reading," said Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, senior author and an
associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at UCSF, and member of
the UCSF Dyslexia Center.
The research is
published online in Psychological Science.
Doctors commonly use
behavioral measures of reading readiness for assessments of ability. Other
measures such as cognitive (i.e. IQ) ability, early linguistic skills, measures
of the environment such as socio-economic status, and whether there is a family
member with reading problems or dyslexia are all common early factors used to
assess risk of developing reading difficulties.
"What was
intriguing in this study was that brain development in regions important to
reading predicted above and beyond all of these measures," said Hoeft.
The researchers
removed the effects of these commonly used assessments when doing the
statistical analyses in order to assess how the white matter directly predicted
future reading ability. They found that left hemisphere white matter in the
temporo-parietal region just behind and above the left ear -- thought to be
important for language, reading and speech -- was highly predictive of reading
acquisition beyond effects of genetic predisposition, cognitive abilities, and
environment at the outset of kindergarten. Brain scans improved prediction
accuracy by 60 percent better at predicting reading difficulties than the
compared to traditional assessments alone.
"Early
identification and interventions are extremely important in children with
dyslexia as well as most neurodevelopmental disorders," said Hoeft.
"Accumulation of research evidence such as ours may one day help us
identify kids who might be at risk for dyslexia, rather than waiting for
children to become poor readers and experience failure."
According to the
National Institute of Child and Human Development, as many as 15 percent of
Americans have major trouble reading.
"Examining
developmental changes in the brain over a critical period of reading appears to
be a unique sensitive measure of variation and may add insight to our understanding
of reading development in ways that brain data from one time point, and
behavioral and environmental measures, cannot," said Chelsea Myers, BS,
lead author and lab manager in UCSF's Laboratory for Educational NeuroScience.
"The hope is that understanding each child's neurocognitive profiles will
help educators provide targeted and personalized education and intervention,
particularly in those with special needs."
Co-authors include
Maaike Vandermosten, PhD of KU Leuven; Emily Farris, PhD of University of Texas
Permian Basin; Roeland Hancock, PhD, Paul Gimenez, BA, Brandi Casto, MS,
Miroslav Drahos, MS, Mandeep Tumber, MS, and Robert Hendren, DO, all of the
Department of Psychiatry at UCSF; Jessica Black, PhD of School of Social Work
at Boston College; and Charles Hulme, DPhil of Department of Psychology at
University College London.
The study was
supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development (K23 HD054720), Flora Family Foundation, UCSF Catalyst Award,
UCSF Resource Allocation Program, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
Young Investigator Award, Stanford University Lucile Packard Foundation for
Children's Health, Spectrum Child Health & Clinical and Translational
Science Award and the Extraordinary Brain Series of the Dyslexia Foundation.
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