Adult dyslexia can be difficult to diagnose because there are varying degrees of severity. Some people are exceedingly intelligent and possess perfectly fine vision and speech, but they have trouble reading or writing at times. Others may have a more serious adult learning disability, which prevents them from being able to function in every day life without substantial help. Many people are diagnosed as children, but often the dyslexia signs are so subtle that people make it to adulthood without ever fully understanding the problem. It seems that treatment is just as obscure, with adult learning centers and different teaching methods being the best tactics.
Symptoms of dyslexia in adults include the inability to recognize written words and letters, a low reading ability, problems understanding auditory words, difficulty understanding rapid commands and difficulty remembering a sequence. Often times, adults will encounter reversals of letters (like seeing a “b” as a “d”) or reversals of words (”saw” instead of “was”). Sometimes adults with dyslexia have a hard time recognizing the spaces between words and they have a hard time sounding out unfamiliar words. Rhyming words, syllable counting, remembering words, recalling places, distinguishing different sounds, associating words with the wrong meanings, keeping time and organizing are some of the problems that dyslexic male and female adults may encounter on a regular basis.
To determine if a person has adult dyslexia, doctors usually evaluate family medical history and perform a series of different tests. They may perform vision, hearing and neurological tests to rule out some other possible disorders. Psychological assessments are done to see if depression, ADHD anxiety or other obstacles are inhibiting one’s ability to process information. Educational evaluations can determine the level of reading difficulties. Most recently, doctors use neuroimaging techniques in dyslexia research — notably, the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET).
More than 40 million Americans suffer from adult dyslexia, which comprises 15% of the U.S. population. Another way of looking at the situation is that 1 in 7 Americans suffer from reading or learning disabilities. Some studies suggest that as many as 90% of all dyslexia sufferers do not even know they exhibit all of the dyslexia signs. Perhaps they know that they are behind in math, reading or spelling, but they don’t understand the root diagnosis.
Beth Kaminski is the co-author of Curing Your Anxiety And Panic Attacks which detailed end panic attacks as well as tips on the various panic disorder medications available at anxietydisordercure.com.
“Often times, adults will encounter reversals of letters (like seeing a “b” as a “d”) or reversals of words (”saw” instead of “was”). Sometimes adults with dyslexia have a hard time recognizing the spaces between words”
I’m glad you qualified reversals of letters with being an adult as without the qualification the idea of dyslexia being related to reversals letters is one of the top misleading statements about dyslexia and causes many a worried parent many sleepless nights.
My niche is visual dyslexia, which affects about 10% of dyslexics. Unlike the difficulty of describing what a dyslexic is, visual dyslexia is much more simplistic. A visual dyslexic can be defined as a person who can describe visual problems that make reading difficult. Those without visual problems that make reading difficult are not visually dyslexic.
The most common visual dyslexia problems are seeing text as if it vibrates and either having letters or parts of letters appear washed out with light so that the letters are hard to recognize. Visual dyslexia is sometimes time dependent where the visual problems become more intense the longer you read. Visual dyslexia can also induce reading headaches or fatigue.
Multi-sensory instruction for visual dyslexics is like teaching someone how to play a good game of Wheel of Fortune. People can get real good at playing Wheel of Fortune but as anyone knows who has watched the game sometimes best to buy that letter. Buying all the letters needed is a fair analogy for what See Right Dyslexia Glasses do.
Visual dyslexics that see vibrating text are in a similar position. Reading for them is analogous to reading in a car that is going down a washboard road . The text seems to bump up and down and it is easy to lose which line you’re reading. The end result is that you have to end up going back reading the same line time after time. Reading becomes a slow difficult task, misreading words is common and by the time you get to the end of a paragraph you are not sure what you’ve read and are often frustrated.
For more information about See Right Dyslexia Glasses and visual dyslexia you can visit http://www.dyslexiaglasses.com . For the majority of dyslexics that have audio and language processing problems there is a link page to free dyslexia products, services, and programs. The address to the links page is http://www.dyslexiaglasses.com/links . There is sure to be something for most dyslexics on that page.