What Causes Adult Dyslexia?

Apart from trauma dyslexia which might occur following some type of trauma or injury to the brain in adulthood that affects your ability to read and write, dyslexia isn’t a condition that can manifest itself in adulthood but something you have had from birth or from a very young age which has simply gone unrecognised. In fact, many people do not know they are dyslexia sufferers until they reach adulthood and happen to have a dyslexia assessment.

Causes of Dyslexia

There is no definitive medical or scientific explanation as to the causes of dyslexia although there are numerous theories.

Inherited Factors

A common theory is that dyslexia and the learning difficulties related to it tend to be inherited through genetics. Therefore, sufferers from dyslexia will often have parents or grandparents who are dyslexia sufferers too. Some theorists also point to a link between left handedness and dyslexia. And, although this doesn’t mean that a left handed person will be dyslexic nor that a child will inherit dyslexia if one of their parents or grandparents were dyslexic, where it has been identified, between a third and a half of all children who are diagnosed as being dyslexic have a history of dyslexia in their family and more than half will have an immediate family member who is left handed.

Hearing Problems

Some researchers believe that hearing problems in children from an early age can affect a child’s ability in learning how letters are supposed to sound which causes the brain to fail to make a connection between the letters and what they are supposed to sound like when put together verbally. This is crucial in early learning, especially when the brain is developing in early childhood in particular.

And, if any hearing problems are not detected early on in a child’s life, they can carry this particular problem right through to adulthood. However, there are also those who believe that hearing problems have little or no bearing on dyslexia and it is the brain’s inability to translate images from the ears or the eyes into understandable language that’s the issue.

Brain Development

Other theories about the causes of dyslexia consist of pinpointing physical aspects of how the brain is made up to be consistent with problems with dyslexia. For example, there are those who will point to neurons (nerve cells) in the brain which develop away from where they are supposed to be located meaning that the brain doesn’t develop properly which then affects learning

Also, some clinical studies suggest that a dyslexia sufferer will try to process language with their right side of the brain whereas it is the left side which has been proven to be the area of the brain which processes and comprehends language related tasks.

Without any categorically accurate evidence as to the causes of dyslexia, it’s hard to determine exactly where the problems lie and many specialists in the field tend to believe that it’s probably a combination of more than one of the explanations above.

Whatever the causes may or may not be, the fact is that the sooner the condition is diagnosed as dyslexia, the sooner an individual can get help. Even in adulthood, sufferers with dyslexia are still able to learn to cope and to improve their reading and writing skills, once their individual strengths and weaknesses have been exposed through a professional dyslexia assessment.