Diseases - Dyslexia

Hello!
Today I'm going to teach you a little bit about a disease very common among children nowadays, dyslexia.

Dyslexia, also known as alexia or developmental reading disorder, is characterized by difficulty with learning to read and with differing comprehension of language despite normal or above-average intelligence.This includes difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, processing speed, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, language skills and verbal comprehension, or rapid naming.
Dyslexia is the most common learning difficulty. Some see dyslexia as distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with hearing or vision, or poor reading instruction.There are three proposed cognitive subtypes of dyslexia (auditory, visual and attentional), although individual cases of dyslexia are better explained by specific underlying neuropsychological deficits (e.g., attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a visual processing disorder) and co-occurring learning difficulties (e.g., dyscalculia and dysgraphia). Although it is considered to be a receptive (afferent) language-based learning disability, dyslexia also affects one's expressive (efferent) language skills.
In early childhood, symptoms that correlate with a later diagnosis of dyslexia include delays in speech, letter reversal or mirror writing, difficulty knowing left from right and difficulty with direction, as well as being easily distracted by background noise. This pattern of early distractibility is sometimes partially explained by the co-occurrence of dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Although this disorder occurs in approximately 5% of children, 25–40% of children with either dyslexia or ADHD meet criteria for the other disorder.
Dyslexic children of school age may exhibit signs such as difficulty identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words (which depend on phonological awareness).They may also show signs of difficulty segmenting words into individual sounds or blending sounds to make words (phonemic awareness). Difficulty with word retrieval or with naming things also feature. They are commonly poor spellers, which has been called dysorthographia or dysgraphia (orthographic coding). Whole-word guesses and tendencies to omit or add letters or words when writing and reading are considered tell-tale signs.
Problems persist into adolescence and adulthood and may be accompanied by trouble summarizing stories as well as with memorizing, reading aloud, and learning foreign languages. Adult dyslexics can read with good comprehension, although they tend to read more slowly than non-dyslexics and perform worse at spelling and nonsense word reading, a measure of phonological awareness. A common misconception about dyslexia assumes that dyslexic readers all write words backwards or move letters around when reading. In fact this only occurs among half of dyslexic readers.

See you in the next entry!