Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Treatments and drugs
By Mayo Clinic staffThere's no known way to correct the underlying brain malfunction that causes dyslexia. Dyslexia treatment is through remedial education, and the sooner intervention begins, the better it generally is for your child. Psychological testing will help your child's teachers develop a suitable remedial teaching program.
Multisensory approach
Teachers may use techniques involving hearing, vision and touch to improve reading skills. Helping a child use several senses to learn — for example, by listening to a taped lesson and tracing with a finger the shape of the letters used and the words spoken — can help him or her process the information.
A reading specialist will focus on five key areas necessary for effective reading:
- Phonemic awareness — phonemes are the smallest sounds in spoken words
- Phonic recognition
- Oral reading ability
- Building a vocabulary
- Reading comprehension
You can help your child learn by reading to him or her often and helping your child pronounce letters and spell out words. If your child learns best by hearing new information first, listen to books on tape with him or her and then read the same story in written form together.
If your child has a severe reading disability, tutoring may need to occur more frequently, and progress may be slower. A child with severe dyslexia may never be able to read well and may need training for vocations that don't require strong reading skills. However, with determination, children and adults with dyslexia can learn to do many things, and a number of famous people have succeeded despite their dyslexia. Children with milder forms of dyslexia often eventually learn to read well enough to succeed in school.
- Lyon GR. Specific language and learning disabilities. In: Kliegman RM. Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics. 18th ed. Philadelphia, Pa.; Saunders Elsevier: 2007. http://www.mdconsult.com/das/book/body/142934465-3/0/1608/82.html?printing=true. Accessed June 11, 2009.
- NINDS dyslexia information page. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/dyslexia/dyslexia.htm. Accessed June 11, 2009.
- Learning disabilities. The Merck Manuals: The Merck Manual for Healthcare Professionals. http://www.merck.com/mmpe/print/sec19/ch299/ch299d.html. Accessed June 11, 2009.
- Dyslexia. National Center for Learning Disabilities. http://www.ncld.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=454. Accessed June 11, 2009.
- What are the signs of dyslexia? International Dyslexia Association. http://www.interdys.org/SignsofDyslexiaCombined.htm. Accessed June 11, 2009.
- Grizzle KL. Developmental dyslexia. Pediatric Clinics of North America. 2007;54:507.
- Hamilton SS. Interventions for children with reading difficulty. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed May 22, 2009.
