MORE NEWS ITEMS <Part 2>

News:

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• Retraining a Dyslexic Brain - A Winston-Salem research team has shown that dyslexic adults reading skills improve after 112 hours of phonics-based instruction. The major change researchers saw was the adult's ability to understand how the language works. Adults in the study also became more accurate when reading simple words and words in text ... Participants have started to read entire books for the first time, have gone back to school and graduated. (Oct 12th 2005)
  
  
  
• Row Erupts Over Dyslexia Denial - A Durham, UK, University education professor has cast doubt on the scientific validity of the term 'dyslexia', saying experts cannot agree on what it is or how to treat it. Writing in the Times Educational Supplement, Julian Elliott said it was largely an "emotional construct" and questions the scientific validity of the term 'dyslexia'. The British Dyslexia Association says the claims are inflammatory. (Sep 2nd 2005)
  
  
  
  
  
• Children's diet linked to disorders - British children are suffering behavioural and learning disorders because their diets are deficient in vital nutrients needed for their brains to function normally, a study reveals today.

  Rigorous scientific research shows that the performance of underachieving children, some of whom were also disruptive, improved dramatically when their diets were supplemented with fish oils.
  
  
  
  

• ADHD Drug Adderall Linked to 20 Deaths - Shire Pharmaceuticals' best-selling drug for hyperactivity disorder has been pulled from the market in Canada after being linked to the deaths of 14 children and six adults.

  Health Canada, the national regulator, said the decision was a result of a "thorough review" of safety data which revealed 20 cases of sudden death and 12 reports of stroke in patients taking Adderall. (Feb 2005)
  
  
  

• Dyslexia Not Unusual in Japan - In some English-speaking countries, 5 percent to 10 percent of people are said to suffer from dyslexia, which affects their ability to learn to read and write despite otherwise normal intellectual development. In Japan, too, although its writing system is very different from that of English, recent research has revealed that there are more people suffering the condition than previously thought.
  
  
• What Brain Scans Reveal - In-depth interview with Sally Shaywitz, Professor of Pediatric Neurology at Yale University. 'The area in the back of the brain, the left occipital temporal region, or the word forming area - activation in that area was significantly related to a child's skill as a reader. So the individual differences in reading skills were related to individual differences in brain activation. That was very important, because this is a very important area in fluency, which is critical to being able to read not only accurately, but also rapidly and with good intonation. So we went from simply geographically identifying the systems to being able to see the locations of potential differences between good and poor readers, and what the role of each of these systems is.'
  
  
• Dyslexia Not the Same in Every Culture - Westerners shudder at the idea of reading even the most basic street signs and instructions in Chinese, a language with 6,000 characters to memorize. 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. Neurologists described the results as "very important and innovative."
  
  
• New Clues to Learning Disability Found - A study finds that delayed brain development and puberty may slow children down. Normal but slowed brain development and the onset of puberty may be important factors in learning disorders such as dyslexia, a new study reports.The study, which appears in the June 21-25 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that children with learning disabilities may have immature brains that simply didn't have the time needed to develop properly.The researchers from Northwestern University found that children with dyslexia showed brain development that was about two to four years younger than their chronological age. (June 2004).
  
  
  
• Children's brains with dyslexia respond abnormally to language stimuli - Nine-year-old Patrick Price bounced up to the huge MRI machine, a powerful brain scanner disguised by drapes to resemble a kid-friendly castle. Inside, he lay nearly motionless as words and symbols flashed on a screen before his eyes. Patrick is one of 80 Maryland youngsters with the reading disability dyslexia who are letting scientists peer inside their brains. The goal: to learn just what goes wrong when dyslexic children try to read and whether certain commercial teaching methods can make the brain rewire itself to read better.
  
  
• Brain Scans Used to Find Dyslexia Clues - Researchers have additional evidence that reading problems are linked to abnormal sound processing, thanks to high-precision pictures of the brain at work. In a recent study, when children without reading problems tried to distinguish between similar spoken syllables, speech areas in the left brain worked much harder than corresponding areas in the right brain, whose function is still unknown. But when children with dyslexia made the same attempt, those right-brain areas actually worked harder, going into overdrive after a brief delay.
  
  
• Unraveling Dyslexic Brains - Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle are making strides understanding how dyslexic brains work. Developmental neuropsychologist Virginia Berninger, Ph.D., and neurophysicist Todd Richards, Ph.D., lead a team of researchers whose studies have shown that the brains of children with dyslexia work about five times harder than other children's brains when performing the same language task. You think you're tired at the end of a school day? Imagine if your brain had to work five times harder!
  
  
• No Child Left behind - Wrightslaw - Information about how the new USA 'No Child Left Behind' legislation will affect you, frequently asked questions, regulations, guidance, etc.
  
  
• Vouchers Don't Help Disabled Students - About 77 percent of private schools taking tax dollars to educate disabled students don't offer special classes for disabled children. A Palm Beach Post examination of the 641 private schools taking McKay vouchers in Florida found that 496 reported on a state Department of Education form that they do not have classes "specifically designed to meet the needs of children with exceptionalities." At The Foundation Academy in Jacksonville, for example, about 70 of the school's 240 students use McKay vouchers, mostly for learning disabilities. But the school's teachers are not certified in Florida to teach special education -- they aren't Florida-certified to teach at all, although they do have college degrees.
  
  
• Interim Report of the Bradford Youth Offending Team - For some 12 months the British Dyslexia Association has been working closely with Bradford Youth Offending Team to examine the issue of dyslexia amongst offenders. Low levels of literacy are well documented amongst offenders but we have found further evidence of a high incidence of dyslexia. We have delivered training to the Youth Offending Team and staff and developed interventions to support learning. The project is now entering its mainstreaming and dissemination phase.
  
  
• Wake Forest School of Medicine Develops Simple Test for Dyslexia - Researchers at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine have come up with a simple test that they think can identify dyslexics and help them find the right treatment. "We're not clinicians here but we try to sort of think outside the box," said Mark Wallace, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy. The experiment is simple. People sit down in front of a screen and a console with two keys. Two lights flash in quick succession while a subtle sound is conveyed through headphones. The subject pushes a button to indicate which light flashed first. The lights are flashed so quickly that people only get the correct answer 50 percent of the time when no sound is used. With the sound, performance improves. (Nov 2003)
  
  
• New typeface to help dyslexics - Dyslexics who have trouble reading words online and in print may soon find relief in a new typeface being developed by a Dutch designer. Unlike traditional typefaces, which re-use the same forms for multiple letters - such as b and d, or p and q - the 'Read Regular' typeface makes each letter significantly unique so that dyslexics can more easily distinguish one character from another. (Oct 2003)
  
  
• Fatty acid deficiency signs predict the severity of reading and related problems in dyslexic children - academic article by John Stein and others publishing research evidence of the symptoms of fatty acid deficiency in dyslexic children, which are usually counteracted by giving children fish oil tablets daily.
  
  
  
  
• 'TIME' magazine article on dyslexia (August 31st 2003) gives an excellent overview of dyslexia symptoms and recent research.The article points out that 'Boys and girls are equally likely to suffer from dyslexia' (as also emerged from Direct Learning's recent research: in a group of 100 randomly picked dyslexic children, there were 54 boys and 46 girls. It seems that the boys are noticed more often by teachers because of their behavior.)
  
  

• Lexiphone Therapy - Dr Isi Beller, a French psychiatrist, has developed a new therapy for children with dyslexia. Children attend a center where they listen to exaggerated words and sounds - like babytalk - played through headphones while they play with Lego or draw. Attendance for an hour twice a week is required for fifty weeks, and the therapy is aimed at re-educating their brains' auditory pathways. Research has shown improvement in most children who took the therapy, though I would have thought that one on one tuition for the same period of time would also have produced substantial improvement . . .

  
  

• Dyslexic children's brains operate more like those of normal readers following training designed to help them hear sounds in words.

  For the first time, researchers have shown that the brains of dyslexic children can be rewired -- after undergoing intensive remediation training -- to function more like those found in normal readers. The training program, which is designed to help dyslexics understand rapidly changing sounds that are the building blocks of language, helped the participants become better readers after just eight weeks.

  For the first time, researchers have shown that the brains of dyslexic children can be rewired -- after undergoing intensive remediation training -- to function more like those found in normal readers.

  The training program, which is designed to help dyslexics understand rapidly changing sounds that are the building blocks of language, helped the participants become better readers after just eight weeks.

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