Why Does ADHD And Dyslexia Co-occur? | Dr. Richard Abbey

Hi, I'm Dr. Richard Abbe and I show parents of children suffering from ADHD what to do so their children don't have to suffer anymore. And today we're going to talk about the co-occurrence of ADHD and dyslexia. Why does it occur so often? Did you know that the concordance rate of ADHD and dyslexia is up to 20 to 40 percent? Such that if you have ADHD, there's a very strong likelihood 20 to 40 percent that you also have dyslexia. Now the opposite is somewhat true. If you have dyslexia, there's about a 20 percent chance that you have ADHD and in particular the inattentive type. So there's a big overlap. And so why is that? More research needs to be done. But mainly what they're finding is that there's a genetic overlap between the two. Also when we look at the brain and we look at how the nodes and networks work together in a concert orchestra symphony, like there's a lot of coordination that takes place, right? What we find is that when people have, and here's where the overlap occurs, right? So there is a strong overlap in working memory and dyslexia. So holding information in mind long enough to decode a word when we're very young and later long enough to comprehend what we're reading. Now if you have this relative weakness in working memory and you have dyslexia, you have like this double deficit, they call it. And that makes it even more difficult. So now you're trying to read. All your cognitive resources are being pulled in into the reading process. And just imagine for a minute, you're reading and you're getting into complex material. You know, you're complex things like physics or chemistry, or maybe you're just reading a complex storyline. You have to keep so many characters in mind and what's going to happen next and what just happened, making inferences and putting it all together. Now if you have dyslexia and you are trying to decode what you're reading, you're going through the arduous process of just decoding the information. Imagine that these cognitive resources, the working memory, the kind of chalkboard of your mind is limited for things like phonological processing. That's the decoding process that we use for dyslexia. So if you have a word like cat, you got to decode each of the phonemes, the smallest parts of language, the C, the A, the T. What do those sounds make? How do you put it all together? Now if you can focus and pay attention and put that all together and you don't have dyslexia, that's great. If you can focus and pay attention and you have dyslexia, boy, that makes it even more difficult. When we think about ADHD, we see a lot of reading problems, but they're not dyslexia. They tend to be errors of omission. So, you know, they omit words, they skip lines, you know, they read several pages and they were often somewhere else in their mind and now they got to reread them at least once, maybe more, and it's difficult to focus and comprehend in what they read. So, we see a different quality of reading. How do you know? Do I have dyslexia? Do I have ADHD? Do I have both? Well, that's where a professional comes in and they help you tease those things apart. And why is this important? Because if you know where you're aiming your target, then you can help the person overcome their weakness. So, are we focused on attention and working memory? Are we focused on the reading process and developing what we call the word form area at this parietal-temporal-occipital junction? Or are we doing both? Are we doing all of those things so our young people can learn to read and eventually read to learn? Because that's what we do in higher education, right? We're reading a bunch of material to learn what we read. And what's the difficulty? Is it the reading process? Is it paying attention to what we read? Is it both? So, it's super hard. And how do we help our young people overcome this? The sooner, the better. There's methods to do this and ways to improve the brain. This is why ADHD and dyslexia strongly co-occur. Now, years ago, I did a study where we were looking at dyslexia and attention, ADHD problems. And because there's a strong overlap, Sally Shaywitz Bennett Shaywitz out of Yale had this idea of perhaps we could use a medication, an ADHD medication, to not only treat the attention problems, but also treat the dyslexia. And we were one of the sites throughout the country, it was a multi-site study that we did and we found a mild but noticeable result, which was really important because it really gave us some information about how you improve these things. Now, you probably don't want to run out and try to get medication to treat dyslexia. There wasn't a strong enough effect and I wouldn't recommend that because the medication didn't actually treat or improve the dyslexia unless the medication was in the system. So, it's not a long-term solution. But what that does do is it tells us ways in which we can improve children's reading. And one of those ways would be to expand that working memory or that attentional process, right? So, actually, that spawned the whole system in our clinic about neuroplasticity. So, off we went and we learned about ways to improve brain functioning without medication to help individuals like those suffering from dyslexia and those with dyslexia and ADHD. Wonderful world out there, awesome technology, tons of innovations. So, what have we learned today? ADHD and dyslexia, they co-occur. If you have ADHD, you have a 20% to 40% chance of having dyslexia and even a 20% chance of having ADHD if you have dyslexia. No worries though, we can help you overcome it. Many professionals throughout the world and the country can do that. If you learned something today, like the video, subscribe to my channel. We will have more informational videos just for you.