What is Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding). It is also called reading disability.
Dyslexia affects areas of the brain that process language.
People with dyslexia have normal intelligence and usually have normal vision. Emotional support also plays an important role for people with this disorder.
Though there's no cure for dyslexia, early assessment and intervention result in the best outcome.
Sometimes dyslexia goes undiagnosed for years and isn't recognized until adulthood.
It's never too late to seek help!
Signs of dyslexia can be difficult to recognize before your child enters school, but some early clues may indicate a problem. Once your child reaches school age, your child's teacher may be the first to notice a problem. Severity varies, but the condition often becomes apparent as a child starts learning to read.
Dyslexia and Symptoms
Signs that a young preschool child may be at risk of dyslexia include:
- Late talking
- Learning new words slowly
- Problems forming words correctly
- Problems remembering or naming letters, numbers and colors
- Difficulty learning nursery rhymes or playing rhyming games
School age
Once your child is in school, dyslexia signs and symptoms may become more apparent, including:
- Reading well below the expected level for age
- Problems processing and understanding what he or she hears
- Difficulty finding the right word or forming answers to questions
- Problems remembering the sequence of things
- Difficulty seeing (and occasionally hearing) similarities and differences in letters and words
- Inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word
- Difficulty spelling
- Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
- Avoiding activities that involve reading
Dyslexia signs in teens and adults are similar to those in children. Some common dyslexia signs and symptoms in teens and adults include:
- Difficulty reading, including reading aloud
- Problems spelling
- Avoiding activities that involve reading
- Mispronouncing names or words, or problems retrieving words
- Trouble understanding expressions that have a meaning not easily understood from the specific words (idioms), such as "piece of cake" meaning "easy"
- Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
- Difficulty summarizing a story
- Trouble learning a foreign language
- Difficulty memorizing
- Difficulty doing math problems
Talk with your doctor if your child's reading level is below what's expected for his or her age or if you notice other signs of dyslexia.
When dyslexia goes undiagnosed and untreated, childhood reading difficulties continue into adulthood.
Dyslexia risk factors increases when we face a family history of dyslexia or other learning disabilities, premature birth or low birth weight, exposure during pregnancy to nicotine, drugs, alcohol or infection that may alter brain development in the fetus.
Source:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dyslexia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353552
