Lecture 3. Type 1 Diabetes & Learning problems

Question 1

What happens in type 1 diabetes?

Answer 1

The pancreas distructs (which normally produces insulin). Trough sugary food, we get glucose in our blood and in order to be able to use it as energy we need insulin to transform it. But if you don’t produce insulin or not sufficient, you cannot use that glucose and that will lead to high blood glucose levels.

Question 2

What is hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia?

What are symptoms of hyperglycemia?

Answer 2

Hyperglycema = too much glucose in the blood

Hypoglycemia = too less glucose in the blood

Symptoms: drinking a lot, enormous thirst, peeing a lot, fatigue.

Question 3

What happens after prolonged hypoglycemia?

And what after prolonged hyperglycemia?

Answer 3

Hypoglycemia –> seizures.

Hyperglycemia –> diabetic ketoacidosis = acute metabolic crisis which can lead to cerebral oedema (a lot of fluid in the brain, increasing the pressure).

Question 4

What is dyslexia?

Answer 4

Persistent, substantially lower reading achievement than the expected level for the child’s age and intelligence, regarding:

• Accurate reading: many errors
• Fluent reading: slow

Question 5

Explain the difficulties in dyslexia:

1. Phoneme awareness
2. Phonological coding
3. Automation
4. Automatically learning visual word forms
5. Different mistakes
6. Reading style
7. Spelling problems

Answer 5

• Phoneme awareness: being aware of the phonemes (speech sounds) that you hear. If you’re not aware of what you’re learning, how can you write down what is being said?
• Phonological coding: if you are aware, then you also need to encode that from a sound to a letter, so the ability to match sounds to letters (b – d).
• Automation: difficulties with making things (reading, learning, math’s) go automatic.
• Automatically learning visual word forms: skilled readers read words not by decoding letter by letter what is written, but by automatically recognizing that a cluster of letters represents a visual word form. Early readers are thought how to read letter by letter, and also children with dyslexia do it this way.
• Different mistakes: letters/words are omitted, added, distorted, swapped. This also happens for tiny words. They may be so caught up with the technical part of reading that they are not aware of those tiny mistakes. As a result they are also not aware when the entire meaning of the text changes (I am allergic – I am already).
• Reading style: the way they read is also often different –> spelling strategy (in head or out loud) or use guessing or breaking words down into syllables.
• Spelling problems: are not necessarily for a diagnosis, but it is common. They often write things as they sound (=phonetic spelling).

Question 6

Prevalence dyslexia,

• Male/female ratio?
• Higher genetic risk?
• Prevalence in NL?

Answer 6

• Male/female ratio? 2:1
• Higher genetic risk? 3x higher risk
• Prevalence in NL? 5%

Question 7

What are sructural brain abnormalities? (2x)

Answer 7

Atypical neural migration (during pregnancy) in:

• Left hemispheric temporal lobe
• Cerebellum

Question 8

In which 4 areas do we see som functional brain abnormalities (found at group level) in dyslexia?

Answer 8

• Temporoparietal cortex: is functioning differently –> important for analyzing letter by letter what is written, so for phonological processing, really important for early readers.
• Occipitotemporal area: is functioning differently –>important for automatically recognizing visual word forms (visual word form area), important for skilled readers.
• Inferior frontal gyrus: is more active –> sort of compensatory process for the fact that more posterior brain regions are dysfunctioning.

Cerebellum: is less active

Question 9

Assessment dyslexia, which reading tests? (3x)

Answer 9

• Single word reading: read a list of single words 1 by 1, get as far as possible in 1 minute.
• Pseudoword reading (Klepel): pseudowords don’t exist, but that doesn’t mean you can’t read it. In this test, very intelligent children cannot compensate reading from the context, since the words don’t exist. So you are really assessing if they are technically able to read by decoding letter by letter what is written.
• Reading stories: seeing if a child is able to read it as a fluent/coherent story, or word for word.

Question 10

Assessment dyslexia, which letter-phoneme correspondence tests? (2x)

Answer 10

• Letter dictation: the child has to listen to a phoneme (f) and then quickly write down the corresponding letter (sometimes v).
• Letter naming: the child gets a sheet of letters and has to quicky say the corresponding phoneme.

Question 11

Assessment dyslexia, which phoneme awareness tests? (2x)

Answer 11

• Phoneme Elision: the child has to say ‘roof’ without the ‘r’ for example. In order to do that correctly, you need to be aware of what sounds are actually in the word roof, before you omit the letter ‘r’.
• Phoneme reversal: the child has to reverse the first letters of someone’s first and last name, for example Tim Cook –> Cim Took.