Stories about: Nadine Gaab

A 30-minute screening test for dyslexia?

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dyslexia screening test
A dyslexia screening app in development could flag children at risk as early as age 4, when interventions are most effective.

Ten to 12 percent of school-aged children have dyslexia. It’s typically diagnosed in second or third grade, only after a child has struggled unsuccessfully at reading. As Nadine Gaab, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital puts it, diagnosis is primarily based upon a “wait-to-fail-approach.” And that comes along with considerable psychological damage and stigma.

“Late diagnosis of dyslexia very often leads to low self-esteem, depression and antisocial behavior,” she says. A much better time to look for early signs of dyslexia would be kindergarten or first grade. With early intervention, many children can attain an average reading ability. …

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For dyslexia, writing is often on the wall from birth

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Writing on the wall-shutterstock_345548735-croppedSome 5 to 17 percent of all children have developmental dyslexia, or unexplained reading difficulty. When a parent has dyslexia, the odds jump to 50 percent. Typically, though, dyslexia isn’t diagnosed until the end of second grade or as late as third grade — when interventions are less effective and self-esteem has already suffered.

“It’s a diagnosis that requires failure,” says Nadine Gaab, PhD, an investigator in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience.

But a new study led by Gaab and lab members Nicolas Langer, PhD, and Barbara Peysakhovich finds that the writing is on the wall as early as infancy — if only there were a way to read it and intervene before the academic, social and emotional damage is done. …

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Music and auditory skills can hone cognition and language

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It may seem counterintuitive that your ability to tell different sounds apart would have anything to do with your ability to read or handle cognitive challenges. But that’s exactly what the lab of Nadine Gaab, PhD, has been showing.

Gaab discussed the research during a recent Longwood Seminar on Music as Medicine at Harvard Medical School:

The Gaab Lab has amassed an impressive body of work showing that auditory processing impairments correlate with developmental dyslexia, and that people who can detect tiny differences between sounds seem to do better both as musicians and as readers. …

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Does musical training help kids do better in school?

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music and executive functionMy daughter just surprised me by signing up for fifth grade band starting this fall. To my further delight, some new research—using both cognitive testing and brain imaging—suggests that as she practices her clarinet, she also may be honing her executive functions.

Like a CEO who’s on top of her game, executive functions—separate from IQ—are those high-level brain functions that enable us to quickly process and retain information, curb impulsive behaviors, plan, make good choices, solve problems and adjust to changing cognitive demands. While it’s already clear that musical training relates to cognitive abilities, few previous studies have looked at its effects on executive functions specifically.

The study, appearing this week in PLOS ONE, compared children with and without regular musical training, as well as adults. To the researchers’ knowledge, it’s the first such study to use functional MRI (fMRI) of brain areas associated with executive function and to adjust for socioeconomic factors. …

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Early brain checkups for dyslexia, autism and more

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Researchers are seeking to track the brain at earlier and earlier ages (here, the brain of a newborn baby born 10 weeks prematurely). © FNNDSC 2011

For the third year running, my daughter is participating in a dyslexia study she entered at age 5, just after finishing preschool. Thinking she was part of a game, she spent about 45 minutes lying still in a rocket ship (in reality, an MRI scanner), doing mental tasks she believed would help lost aliens find their way back to their planet.

All the while, her brain was being imaged, helping a team led by Nadine Gaab of Children’s Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience to find a pattern indicating that she might be at risk for dyslexia. Such signatures might flag children who could benefit from early intervention, sparing them the frustration of struggling with dyslexia once in school.

Getting brain MRIs from young children – without resorting to sedation — is a difficult feat (Gaab and colleagues shared their protocol in the Journal of Visualized Experiments). But as reported in today’s Boston Globe, Gaab and Children’s neuroradiologist Ellen Grant are pushing the envelope even further, trying to find MRI signatures of dyslexia in infants. …

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