According to a study funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Children with poor reading skills who underwent an intensive, six-month training program to improve their reading ability showed increased connectivity in a particular brain region, in addition to making significant gains in reading.
“We have known that behavioral training can enhance brain function.” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “The exciting breakthrough here is detecting changes in brain connectivity with behavioral treatment. This finding with reading deficits suggests an exciting new approach to be tested in the treatment of mental disorders, which increasingly appear to be due to problems in specific brain circuits.”
For the study, Timothy Keller, Ph.D., and Marcel Just, Ph.D., who are both from the Carnegie Mellon University, randomly assigned 35 kids age 8-12 with poor reading skills to an intensive, remedial reading program, and 12 other kids to a control group that received normal classroom instruction. The researchers also had a group of 25 children who were rated as average or above-average readers by their teachers. This group of 25 children got normal classroom education too. All of the programs were given over a six months of schooling for five days a week in 50-minute sessions with three students per teacher. The focus of these programs was improving readers’ ability to decode unfamiliar words.
Using a technology called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), the researchers were able to measure structural properties of the children’s white matter, the insulation-clad fibers that provide efficient communication in the central nervous system. DTI shows the movement of water molecules through white matter to show the quality of white matter connections. The better the connection, the more the water molecules move in the same directions, the better the information transfer between the brain regions.
Before the study began, poor readers showed lower quality white matter than average readers in a brain region called the anterior left centrum semiovale. Six months later after the intensive training, the poor readers showed significant increases in the anterior left centrum semiovale. Children who did not receive this intensive training did not show an increase in this brain region, suggesting that the changes seen in the remedial training group were not due to natural maturation of the brain.
In an effort to further find the mechanism underlying this change, the researchers proposed that a process called myelination may be key. Myelin is akin to electrical insulation, allowing for more rapid and efficient communication between nerve cells in the brain. However, the directional association between brain changes and reading improvements remains unclear — whether intensive training brings about increased myelination that results in improved word decoding skills, or whether improved word decoding skills leads to changes in reading habits that result in greater myelination.
“Our findings support not only the positive effects of remediation and rehabilitation for reading disabilities, but may also lead to improved treatments for a range of developmental conditions related to brain connectivity, such as autism,” noted Marcel Just, one of the researchers in this study.
source: techcombo
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