By Tammy Mahan
Approximately 60 to 100 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD also have two or more other related conditions and one of the most notable conditions is dyslexia.
According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health,” dyslexia is a learning disability that can hinder a person’s ability to read, write, spell, and sometimes speak. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in children and persists throughout life. The severity of dyslexia can vary from mild to severe.”
Often time’s doctors miss the signs of dyslexia in children with ADHD because the signs and symptoms are similar in many aspects of both conditions.
Dyslexia is a condition in which the brain cannot translate images such as letters and numbers. The brain transposes the letters so a child with dyslexia may see the word winter as “inwter” this obviously causes problems with reading and comprehension. The same thing is true for math, if a child is given the following math problem 345 + 821 they may see it as 435+ 128 and of course, their answer is going to be incorrect because the numbers they are adding together is not the correct set of numbers.
Some children have difficulty speaking because what they hear is not what is being said. Children learn to talk by hearing words and sentences and eventually they learn what the word means and repeat it. Such as young children who are just starting to learn to talk, if they hear “Mommy loves you” every night before bed and then they are given a hug or kiss they will eventually realize that “Mommy” is the person talking to them and putting them to bed so they will start to say part of the word such as “mama” and then “mommy.”
Children who have dyslexia often hear more of a mumbling instead of clear words. Therefore, it takes them longer to learn to talk and they usually will pronounce the words incorrectly such as “ommy” instead of “mommy.” Depending on the severity of the speech disability, they may need speech therapy to learn to talk.
So, what is the connection between dyslexia and ADHD? Scientists have done genetic testing on children with ADHD and found that dyslexia and ADHD share the same genetic background. Both conditions also have been found to share some of the same chromosome differences making the two conditions more likely to accompany each other. In other words if a child is diagnosed with either ADHD or dyslexia there is a very good chance the child has both conditions and should be tested for the condition that has not already been diagnosed.
While children who have ADHD without dyslexia still have learning disabilities, when you toss the dyslexia in to the mix, it makes the learning disabilities even more severe. Not only does the child have a learning disability but also they are faced with moderate to severe cases of loss of concentration and an inability to focus on anything for more than a few minutes and sometimes only seconds.
Children who fall into the ADHD/ dyslexia category cannot generally be taught by the traditional means used in the school systems. Luckily, there are special tools called motor sensory tools that are very beneficial in helping children with ADHD and dyslexia learn to read, write and do math problems.
Tammy Mahan has worked in the healthcare field for over 20 years. In her free time, she enjoys writing articles for Healthline.com.
I have looked for new research for the connection between Dyslexia and ADHD and was unable to find any new explanations to the statistics.