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EVERY DAY, teenager Matthew Hands takes pills designed for treating motion sickness. He takes them not beeause he suffers with car sickness, but because he is dyslexic.
And after an extensive course of treatment, the 15-year-old is preparing to take GCSEs and has already passed two exams - successes that, for him, would have been unthinkable even a year ago.
The theory behind this treatment - that dyslexia involves the parts of the brain involved in movement or balance rather than those controlling thought and language - was once dismissed by the medical establishment but scientific evidence is emerging to support this idea.
Over the past ten days, Dr Harold Levinson, the American psychiatrist and neurologist who frst came up with the concept, has been holding clinics in Britain, diagnosing and recommended treatment for more than 100 young patients.
Dyslexia is a complex condition which affects 4% to 9% of people in Britain. The usual symptoms are difficulties with reading, spelling and the written word.
WHAT distinguishes dyslexics from many others with reading problems is that dyslexies' levels of reading are well below their capability as measured by their intelligence.
Much work into the disorder has been centred on regions of the brain involved in language processing, but Dr Levinson says that researchers have been looking in the wrong place.
'One hundred years ago, two English psychiatrists reported on children who had severe reading problems but who were bright,' he explains. 'They called the condition dyslexia.
'The problem was they already knew of another condition where a lesion in a specific part of the brain left people unable to read, and it was assumed that dyslexic children had damage to that same area.
'A lot of authorities still go along with that idea, but in fact the problem lies elsewhere.
He says the disorder is linked to the inner ear and cerebellum - the key part of the brain for a number of functions including balance, co-ordination, and eye movement.
For support for the idea, Dr Levinson points to the discovery he that when astronauts are in zero gravity, they exhibit dyslexic-like symptoms, due, he says, to the effects that weightlessness has on the inner ear and cerebellum. They find it difieult to read and tend to reverse letters d and b in the same way as people with dyslexia.
'You can achieve the same effect if you spim someone aroumd. They get dizzy amd then have a similar difficulty in reading,' he says.
It is for this reason that he devised the concept of giving motion-siekness pills to sufferers to regulate and normalise balance and movement. And it works, he says, in 75% to 85% of cases.
'The inner ear amd cerebellum work like a fine-tuner to the brain,' says Dr Levinson. 'They filter all the signals coming in and being sent out. If any of these signals is not fine-tuned, the processor in the brain to which the signal is being sent will have difficulty handling information.
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'What the travel sickness pill does is to chemically fine-tune the system in much the same way as you tune in a television set when the pieture is drifting.
Matthew Hands, who lives in Leamington Spa, has been on the therapy for a year, and his many mother, Angela, says his progress has been incredible.
'Matthew was five years old when his dyslexia was diagnosed by a psychologist,' she says. 'We went down the usual road with private reading lessons after school and a workshop on Saturdays. The basis of it all was extra tuition.
'Last year, we saw Dr Levinson on his first visit to Britain. He put Matthew on a course of treatment which involves taking several motion-sickness pills a day as well as various vitamins and supplements. The cocktail of pills is designed specificaUy for each individual.
'The results have been wonderful. Before this treatment, Matthew would have been unlikely to have passed any exams - not because of lack of intelligence, but because of the restrictions imposed by the very nature of his dyslexia.
'He has just taken exams in the run-up to next year's GCSEs, and the first two results he has had back were both passes at C grade. That is spectacular - and we know it is all down to the he is now getting from Dr Levinson.'
Professor John Stein, a leading specialist in dyslexia and senior medical tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, says: 'Recently we, and others, have confirmed Dr Levinson's idea.'
'We have found that there is something different about the cerebellum in dyslexies. It is biochemical. When we looked at the metabolism of cells in the cerebellum, we found a difference compared to normal readers.'
HE SAYS it fits in with the theory that dyslexies have an imperfection of a special set of nerve cells in the brain.
These magna (or big) cells are important for the timing of events and work in both the visual and hearing areas of the brain. They are involved with the sounds of letters and the movement of images of letters across the retina.
But although the cerebellum idea is becoming more accepted, there is less agreement over the use of motion-sickness pills.
These pills work on the vomiting centre, which is located elose to the part of the brain responsible for balance in the brain stem.
One theory is that the pills affect this balancing system and put the signalling back on track. Professor Stein says that one of the main concerns with dyslexia in Britain is lack of funding for research.
'We have been trying to get funding from the Government for four years, but it is difficult.
'Around 10% of children have reading problems, yet we cannot get funding for research.'
If money was available, he says, researchers might be able to investigate new areas, including how effective motion sickness pills really are.
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