What Causes Learning Disabilities
Anytime something negatively impacts your child, you want to know what happened. What went wrong? What caused the problem? Is there a cure? Researchers are fast at work trying to get a grasp on some answers. What they know thus far is that multiple factors contribute to learning disabilities. For many years, biological factors were seen as the lone culprit. Learning deficits were believed to be caused solely by a brain abnormality. While we know problems in brain development can cause a learning disability, studies suggest that a child’s environment plays a pivotal role in how debilitating the disability will ultimately be.
Experience has shown making improvements in a learning disabled student’s home environment as well as their school program can significantly improve their functioning. This is important information to keep in mind when the fact that learning disabilities are permanent feels too heavy to bear.
As researchers delve deeper into biological factors, they have developed four categories to explain what may be going on for the learning disabled student. These four general categories are brain injury, errors in brain development, neuro-chemical imbalances, and heredity. Because there are no definitive neurological tests for learning disabilities, pinpointing the student’s particular deficit can look a lot like guess work.
As mentioned previously, the brain has been the guilty party in almost all that surrounds learning disabilities. Even though the environment can make things better or worse, problems start in the brain. But what exactly went wrong there in the first place? Well it was originally thought that some injury occurred and this created the deficits we now call learning disabilities. But research quickly showed us that brain injuries are almost as common among typical achievers as they are among children having trouble in school. Upwards of 20% suffer serious injury to the brain by age 6 but never develop learning problems. Brain injury due to birth trauma has also come up short. One study showed a similar number of students experiencing birth trauma reading a year or two ahead and some reading a year or two behind. Hence, the picture is muddled.
Here is what we do know: Brain injury that have been shown to produce learning disabilities are brain hemorrhages, brain tumors, encephalitis, meningitis, untreated glandular disorders in infancy and infant hypoglycemia. Other health factors such as malnutrition and exposure to toxic chemicals have been indicated. Radiation and chemotherapy treatments can cause learning disabilities as well as anything that deprives the brain of oxygen such as choking, suffocation, drowning, smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning, and some birth complications. Still more factors that could cause learning disabilities that would result from the condition of the mother during pregnancy might be diabetes, kidney disease, measles, drug or alcohol use. Premature infants’ brains are more vulnerable to injury. Sometimes the injury is immediately evident but sometimes the effects are more subtle and delayed. Prompt attention is always in the best interest of your child.
Finally, a number of research studies have found that children with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder evidence at least one of several types of damage to the brain structure. The damage usually manifest in one of the following ways:
1. Fewer numbers of brain cells in important areas of the brain
2. Smaller size of brain cells
3. Brain cells that moved into the wrong part of the brain (dysplasia)
4. Lower than normal blood flow to specific areas of the brain
5. Brain cells that metabolize glucose (the brain's primary fuel) at lower than normal levels
Contact The Learning Center to Determine if Your Child Has Learning Disabilities