New research shows promise for children with dyslexics

What is dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a language based problem characterised by a persistent difficulty with reading and spelling. Symptoms include difficulties learning letter-sound relationships, slow and effortful reading and making many mistakes when reading and spelling.

It is largely independent of IQ, meaning that someone with a high or low IQ can have dyslexia. One way that dyslexia is identified is a significant discrepancy between IQ and scores on standardised tests of reading and spelling.

Dyslexia is thought to affect as many as 10% of Australians.

While it does not affect intelligence or learning capacity directly, reading difficulties can affect learning in the classroom as children who can't read well find it hard to keep up with the rest of the class and often have difficulties with not only English but other subjects, particularly those that require absorbing a lot of written information.

A new study has found something that may help!

Researchers from the Department of General Psychology at the Unitersity of Padova have found that reading materials with spacing between the letters can help dyslexic children read faster and better. They found that extra wide letter spacing doubled the reading accuracy and increased reading speed by 20 percent in a sample of 94 dyslexic children aged between 8 and 14 years.

It appears that this approach worked because children with dyslexia are more affected by letter spacing: when letters are too close together they have difficulty identifying letters.

Children without dyslexia did not benefit from the extra wide spacing.

The researchers advised that extra letter spacing could be a way to get children with dyslexia to read more, which is a key way of improving reading skills.

"Practitioners only know too well that getting dyslexic children to read more is a key component in achieving long-lasting improvements in reading skills," says the study. "Extra large letter spacing, which could even be optimised adaptively on an individual basis, can certainly contribute to achieving this goal."

To learn more about dyslexia, see our video explaining dyslexia and what Henry Winkler (Fonzie from Happy Days) did to help manage his condition.

 

Early detection of mental health issues

Healthy Australian Kids

The Australian government, supported by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) has proposed an initiative, which will be part of the The Healthy Kids Check, to screen Australian 3 year olds for signs of psychiatric and developmental conditions such as autism

Under this voluntary program parents can bring their children to be assessed by General Practitioners (GPs), who will then refer children who display troubling behaviour to psychologists and paediatricians for further assessment and, if necessary, treatment.

Newly researched attention deficit may affect learning in the classroom

A new attention disorder?

A recent study conducted by Imran Dhamani and team of Macquarie University has identified an attention difficulty which may affect as many as 1 in 2 children in a classroom - and it's not ADHD.

Research reveals the part of your brain responsible for a song getting stuck in your head!

If you've ever had a song stuck in your head, you'll be interested in the latest research investigating the brain region responsible for recognition of familiar tunes revealed as part of a study into Semantic dementia.

Semantic dementia research

Semantic dementia (SD) is a rare type of dementia characterised by a loss of semantic memory, memory for generalised concept based factual information (i.e, general knowledge). The most common symptoms, particularly early on, are an impaired ability to retrieve words from memory and impaired comprehension of word meanings. It also affects patients' ability to recognise objects and sounds.

Parenthood changes your brain!

Parents may not be surprised by the finding that being a parent actually changes your brain (some may be surprised that the changes are good ones!). Research shows that parents have different patterns of brain activity in some areas than non-parents.

One study found that hormonal changes that occur in pregnancy increase the number of dendrites in the brain. Dendrites are the projections from a neuron (or brain cell) that act to facilitate communication between neurons. So, the more dendrites, the more chance of neural connections. The neural connections that are created during pregnancy have been shown in rat studies to enhance memory and learning. This is likely to be because learning and memory are important in raising young.

Mental health and the federal budget

The 2012-13 federal budget has been released, and according to some expert commentators, there is good and bad news for mental health arising from the budget.

The good news is:

• Overall funding for mental health has not been cut.
• Funding for the Mental Health Nurse Incentive Program, providing incentives for community based general practices to engage mental health nurses, has been maintained.
• The government will provide $21 million to fund additional allied mental health services for patients under the Better Access initiative, whereby treatment for those with diagnosed mental health problems is partially covered by Medicare.
• New spending of $115m over five years is directed towards better mental health care for veterans.
• From 2014-2015 $9.1m will be provided to the Australian Bureau of Statistics to conduct its Survey of Disability every three years, rather than every six years.

Positive thinking changes your brain!

Psychology has for some time now borrowed from the philosophies and practices of Buddhism (e.g., meditation and mindfulness), to help treat conditions like depression and anxiety and to help people increase their general psychological well-being.

New breakthroughs in neuropsychology and neuroscience have allowed us to better understand how these practices work to actually rewire the brain to allow for more calmness and greater happiness.