If your child has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and is having difficulties sounding out certain letters, referring to something using an incorrect word choice or having challenges with sound patterns, he or she could also be struggling with dyslexia. In fact, the International Dyslexia Association notes that ADHD and dyslexia are “distinct conditions that frequently overlap.”
[See: 8 Myths and Misconceptions About Dyslexia.]
Russell A. Barkley, clinical professor of psychiatry, Virginia Treatment Center for Children at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, says that “up to about 25 percent of ADHD kids, on average, have dyslexia.” The association explains that “dyslexia is a language-based learning disability characterized by difficulties with accurate and fluent word recognition, spelling and reading decoding. People with dyslexia have problems discriminating sounds within a word or phonemes, a key factor in their reading and spelling difficulties.”
Such difficulties, Barkley says, may lead to academic struggles, especially considering the increase in schoolwork as a child ages. He explains that some people with ADHD are easily distracted, which can lead to slower reading speeds. ADHD is linked to working memory issues, making it challenging for people to “hold in mind what they’re supposed to be doing,” he says, including what’s heard or seen in a story.
Similarities and Differences Between ADHD and Dyslexia
However, the association notes that while ADHD and dyslexia can occur together, they do not cause each other. At the same time, both can share certain characteristics, which usually include:
— Trouble writing
— Handwriting problems
— Difficulty paying attention; when it comes to reading, its demands make them tire quickly, limiting the ability to sustain attention
— Reading comprehension challenges
Still, there are key differences. For example the ADHD reader may drop off endings of words, lose his or her place or bypass punctuation. The dyslexic reader, on the other hand, is more likely to misread large and small words. In terms of writing, someone with ADHD is more likely to make mistakes related to organization and proofreading. The dyslexic writer does too, but also has issues with spelling and grammar.
[See: 8 Things You Didn’t Know About Counseling.]
For children, reading problems are often amplified around the third grade, a time when schoolwork demands — especially reading aloud — mount. “Kids with ADHD-related reading problems don’t get out of the material what other kids might,” says Barkley, author of “Managing ADHD in School: The Best Evidence-Based Methods for Teachers.” To compound the problem, these children are often subjected to ridicule from judgmental peers. As a result, he says that children could develop an anxiety disorder. All of this, he explains, acts “like a pebble in a pond” where social functioning, peer-based stigmas and anxiety — all built around feelings of incompetency — can bubble up.
Adults too may experience challenges related to ADHD and dyslexia. For example, Barkley says that dyslexia in particular can create issues in the workplace when it comes to reading or filling out a job application.
Possible Reasons for Overlap
As to the reason behind any overlap between ADHD and dyslexia, Barkley says that “some of the risk genes in one are showing up in the risk genes in another.” This indicates that “some shared genetic liability is likely related to the speed of reading processing and paying attention.” However, he explains that a person with dyslexia rarely has a relative with ADHD and vice versa; “it’s not as though one has a huge liability for the other,” Barkley says.
Interestingly, he also says it’s worth keeping something called “nonrandom mating” in mind. It’s a concept explaining that people tend to associate with, and ultimately mate with, people who have similar social and educational backgrounds. Though not a definitive concept, Barkley says the idea gives rise to the possible explanation as to why learning disorders may be more common in people with ADHD, since he says both people often experience similar academic and life situations.
Holistic Approaches and the Brain
For Dr. Harold Levinson, medical director at the Levinson Medical Center for Learning Disabilities in Great Neck, New York, and author of the forthcoming book, “Feeling Smarter and Smarter,” associations between disorders should be viewed with a more critical eye. He explains that a great deal of “circular logic” surrounds many disorders like ADHD and dyslexia, saying that the host of symptoms required to obtain a formal ADHD diagnosis is so large that it can end up excluding people who may have mild and moderate cases, but yet who technically don’t meet the criteria for a diagnosis. Similarly, he feels the same is true with dyslexia, adding that professional assessment of it is often based solely on the leading or most obvious symptoms, which he says may mean other conditions are overlooked altogether. He likens this to describing a human as something that only has hair or a nose, when in reality many physical and biological characteristics make up a human being. Levinson explains that a holistic approach should become more widely considered in order to treat people more thoroughly.
For example, he says that the common denominator involved with ADHD and dyslexia — along with other disorders including, but not limited to, phobias and anxiety problems — is the brain’s cerebellum. “The thing that causes balance and coordination problems is same thing that causes ADHD, phobias and anxiety disorders,” he says of the cerebellum. If signals originating there become scrambled en route to different paths in the brain, various disorders can arise, Levinson explains. If they’re scrambled once they get to the prefrontal cortex, ADHD often develops. It they become scrambled in the anxiety disorder center of the brain, he says someone may have phobias. Ultimately, the brain finds methods to compensate for underlying problems, he says, but it’s the cerebellum that is at the root of it all. It’s this notion that opens up the potential for new treatment methods, he says, pointing to instances in which he’s observed patients take antivertigo medication and gain improvements in focus and distraction, as well as reading and writing abilities. While he says this isn’t a replacement for ADHD stimulant medication, it shows that additional methods can help. “It’s important to understand disorders in all of their dimensions,” he says, adding that it’s possible to treat both the prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum to get the best results.
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
For concerned parents, the key is to watch for developing anxieties in children, Barkley says, and to take note of language difficulties which are often an “early warning sign” that dyslexia-related problems are looming. He suggests taking a proactive approach by talking with teachers and outlining what worked well for their child in previous years. “Don’t wait for the teacher to clue you in,” he says, and be sure he or she works well with children who have both disorders.
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Is There a Connection Between ADHD and Dyslexia? originally appeared on usnews.com
