What Is Dyslexia? Symptoms Causes Diagnosis and Treatment.

Dyslexia is a disability in decoding speech sounds and languages. It is a learning disorder. Dyslexia patients have problems understanding speech sounds. They struggle to relate words and letters to decode the meaning. Also known as a reading disability, the differences in certain parts of the brain that help process language cause dyslexia.

Children with dyslexia have no problems with intelligence, hearing, or vision. Most children do well in school with tutoring or educational programs. They need emotional and psychological support from their parents, teacher, and society.

Dyslexia is not curable, but early detection, diagnosis, and intervention help manage the health condition. The condition might remain untreated for a long time and can only get detected in adulthood. You should immediately seek help and medical attention when the doctor identifies the health condition.

Dyslexia Symptoms

Dyslexia does not get identified easily. It needs the children to grow up and enter school. We can recognize some early indications with the help of the teacher. The teacher can feel the child's condition when the child is not responding like other children. The degree of the effect on each child varies. It gets prominent when a child gets to the level of reading.

Dyslexia Symptoms in a Child Before School

• Talking or responding late

• Slowly learning unfamiliar words

• Difficulty in forming words correctly

• Confused in similar sounding words,

• Reversing sounds in words

• Difficulty remembering letters, numbers, and colors or naming them correctly

• Problems in learning nursery rhymes

• Difficulty in playing rhyming games

Dyslexia Symptoms in a Child at the School Age

Dyslexia symptoms in children get prominence in the learning environment in schools.

• Reading is not on par with the required level and age

• After hearing, the child faces difficulty in processing, understanding, and decoding it

• Hardship in identifying the correct word or answer formation to the question

• Difficulty in remembering the chain of events

• Problems in seeing and hearing (occasionally) similar words or sounds and the differences in similar letters and words

• Difficulty in pronouncing unfamiliar words

• Faces problems spelling words

• Requires more time than usual to complete a task related to reading or writing

• Escape the activities that need reading

Dyslexia Symptoms in Teens and Adults

• Faces hardship in reading and reading aloud

• Slow and effort-driven reading and writing

• Difficulty in spelling words

• Escape the activities that need reading

• Difficulty remembering words and pronouncing names and words

• Requires more time than usual to complete a task related to reading or writing

• Having problems summarizing stories, learning new languages, or solving math word problems

Dyslexia Causes

The differences in certain parts of the brain that help process and decode languages and the ability to read and write cause dyslexia. It can be in the family medical history or the previous generations. Genes that affect the brain in processing language and reading have caused dyslexia.

Dyslexia Diagnosis

Doctors take many factors and tests into account to diagnose and confit dyslexia.

Questions of Child Development, Educational Difficulties, and Medical History

A doctor will ask questions on these factors and also enquire if anyone in the family had these issues, including dyslexia detection or other forms of learning disability.

Fill out a Questionnaire.

The doctors will give a questionnaire with related questions to detect dyslexia for the child, caregivers, and teacher to fill out. The doctor will conduct a test on reading and language disability to confirm dyslexia or otherwise.

Tests on the Brain, Hearing, and Vision

Neurological tests on the brain will help the doctor identify the cause of the health condition, whether dyslexia or any other disorder leading to or aggravating the child's health condition.

Psychological Evaluation

The doctor may enquire about the mental health condition of your child. She may ask you and the child questions to identify if social issues, anxiety, depression, or any other psychological factor is causing the learning disability or dyslexia.

Reading and Other Academic Skills Tests

A doctor may take a test of your child related to the educational skills and deploy an expert to analyze the quality of the learning and reading skills.

Dyslexia Treatment

The medical fraternity does not know about dyslexia cure, nor how to treat it to correct the individual differences in the brain causing dyslexia. Early detection of dyslexia and the course of treatment to ensure an improvement in the health condition faster.

First, consult with the pediatrician or the family doctor to ensure that other causes exist leading to health reading problems. The pediatrician may also refer the child to the

• Ophthalmologist or optometrist for eye tests

• Audiologist to test hearing

• Neurologists to test brain and nervous system disorder

• Neuropsychologists test the functions of the central nervous system and the behavior and responses

• Pediatrician to determine the development and behavior causing dyslexia or other disorder

Let us discuss techniques to treat the learning disorder and improve the condition as the child grows up.

Academic Techniques

A doctor intervenes with a specifically designed educational approach for the affected child. It evaluates the reading ability, academic skill as per age, and mental health condition by taking help from the teacher to develop an individual learning program.

Treatment Focuses on Helping the Child

• Learn to recognize and use the minor sounds called phonemes, sounds that make up the word

• Understand strings and letters

• Comprehend what the child has read

• Read aloud to build confidence and reading accuracy

• Build a vocabulary of words the child recognize

Conclusion - Individualistic Educational Plan (IEP)

Schools must help the child with individualistic help to the child diagnosed with dyslexia as a child. Teachers are directly involved with the doctors to work together and improve the learning and reading abilities by creating a customized and structured written plan to address the needs and how the school will support the treatment.