MRI Might Allow Earlier Diagnosis of Dyslexia: Study | WPN World People News

Brain scans may help diagnose people with the common reading disorder dyslexia, a new study reveals.

MRI scans in 40 kindergarten children revealed a link between poor pre-reading skills and the size of a structure that connects two language-processing areas in the brain, the researchers said.

Previous studies have shown that this structure -- called the arcuate fasciculus -- is smaller and less organized in adults with poor reading skills than in those with normal reading ability. But it wasn't known if these differences caused reading problems or resulted from a lack of reading experience.

Dyslexia, which affects about 10 percent of Americans, is usually diagnosed in children sometime around second grade. These findings suggest that brain scans could help identify children with dyslexia even before they begin reading, so they can receive help earlier.

It's not clear what causes these brain structure differences, but they could result from both genetic and environmental factors.

The researchers plan to follow groups of children as they progress to second grade in order to determine if the brain structure differences identified in kindergarten predict reading difficulties.

We don't know yet how it plays out over time, and that's the big question: Can we, through a combination of behavioral and brain measures, get a lot more accurate at seeing who will become a dyslexic child, with the hope that that would motivate aggressive interventions that would help these children right from the start instead of waiting for them to fail.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services