Symptoms of dyslexia

The most common signs and symptoms associated with dyslexia are:

• Learning to read – the child, despite having normal intelligence and receiving proper teaching and parental support, has difficulty learning to read.
• Milestones reached later – the child learns to crawl, walk, talk, and ride a bicycle later than the majority of other kids.
• Speech – apart from being slow to learn to speak, the child commonly mispronounces words, finds rhyming extremely challenging, and does not appear to distinguish between different word sounds.
• Slow at learning sets of data – at school, the child takes much longer than the other children to learn the letters of the alphabet and how they are pronounced. There may also be problems remembering the days of the week, months of the year, colors, and some arithmetic tables.
• Coordination – the child may seem clumsier than their peers. Catching a ball may be difficult.
• Left and right – the child commonly gets “left” and “right” mixed up.
• Reversal – numbers and letters may be reversed without realizing.
• Spelling – might not follow a pattern of progression seen in other children. The child may learn how to spell a word today and completely forget the next day.
• Phonology problems – phonology refers to the speech sounds in a language. If a word has more than two syllables, phonology processing becomes much more difficult. For example, with the word “unfortunately” a person with dyslexia may be able to process the sounds “un” and “ly,” but not the ones in between.
• Concentration span – children with dyslexia commonly find it hard to concentrate. Many adults with dyslexia say this is because, after a few minutes of non-stop struggling, the child is mentally exhausted. A higher number of children with dyslexia also have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), compared with the rest of the population.
• Sequencing ideas – when a person with dyslexia expresses a sequence of ideas, they may seem illogical.
• Autoimmune conditions – people with dyslexia are more likely to develop immunological problems, such as hay fever, asthma, eczema, and other allergies.

Causes of dyslexia

A child with dyslexia may have more difficulty than usual in reading, spelling, and concentrating.

Specialist doctors and researchers are not sure what causes a person to develop dyslexia.

Some evidence points to the possibility that the condition is inherited, as dyslexia often runs in families.

Genetic causes of dyslexia

A team at the Yale School of Medicine found that defects in a gene, known as DCDC2, were associated with problems in reading performance.

Treatments for dyslexia

It is important for family members and the person with dyslexia to remember that dyslexia is not a disease. We live in a society where reading and writing are integral parts of everyday life – interventions that help people with dyslexia are aimed at improving their coping skills.

There is currently no “cure” for dyslexia. There are, however, a range of specialist and well-targeted interventions that can help children and adults improve their reading and writing skills.

The sooner a child is diagnosed and receives support, the more likely he or she will achieve long-term improvements.

Psychological testing helps the teacher develop a better-targeted teaching program for the child.

A teacher who is trained in helping children with dyslexia will use a range of techniques to improve the child’s reading skills. These techniques usually involve tapping into the child’s senses, including touch, vision, and hearing.

Some children find that tracing their finger around the shape of letters helps them process data more effectively.