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WASHINGTON - Nine-year-old Patrick Price bounced up to the huge MRI machine, a powerful brain scanner disguised by drapes to resemble a kid-friendly castle. Inside, he lay nearly motionless as words and symbols flashed on a screen before his eyes.
Patrick is one of 80 Maryland youngsters with the reading disability dyslexia who are letting scientists peer inside their brains. The goal: to learn just what goes wrong when dyslexic children try to read and whether certain commercial teaching methods can make the brain rewire itself to read better.
While specially crafted instruction clearly helps dyslexic children become successful readers, there's little proof of how many of the expensive programs work, says Georgetown University neuroscientist Guinevere Eden.
"Getting information on what works, it's hard. Families go through four and five programs. They mortgage their houses," says Eden, who directs Georgetown's Center for the Study of Learning. "It's a vulnerable population."
Consumer issues aside, exactly what brain areas are activated when a dyslexic child processes words remains a question. Competing theories are driving different approaches to treatment, making it important to understand the disorder's complex neurologic underpinnings.
"It's pretty critical work," says G. Reid Lyon of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a division of the National Institutes of Health that is financing Eden's research.
First, Eden studied readers without dyslexia to document developmental changes required for reading that begin in early school years.
Her findings validated a theory proposed in 1925 by dyslexia pioneer Samuel Orton: Normally, youngsters depend more on the visually oriented right side of the brain at first, perhaps interpreting words as if they were pictures. As reading matures, the brain's language-linked left side grows to dominate, and visual stimulation is suppressed.
Now she's examining dyslexic brains using a noninvasive scanner that tells what neurons are activated during reading attempts by measuring their changing oxygen levels.
Inside this "functional MRI," Patrick watches a screen flashing a mix of real words and unreadable symbols. His orders: Click one button if each screen contains a tall letter or symbol, another if it doesn't.
After initial brain scanning, all the kids will get, for free, $3,000 worth of a commercial dyslexia reading program - one-on-one tutoring.
In 18 months, additional MRI testing should tell what brain-level difference the extra reading programs have made and, if they have worked, which children had been most likely to benefit.
But the youngsters learn about their own brains right away through an Eden tactic designed to boost dyslexics' self-esteem. "It helps kids to know something about their brain is different, is special," she says. So she sends them home with brain pictures and stickers."That's my brain?" marvels Patrick, staring at images of his cortex. "Wow!"