Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether there are associations between polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) blood levels, reading/writing performance and performance in neuropsychological tasks. Moderate to strong correlations were found between PUFA levels (specific omega-6/omega-3 ratios) and reading/writing abilities, and the former and neuropsychological test scores. Mediation models analyzing the direct and indirect effects of PUFA on reading and writing scores showed that the effects of fatty acids on learning measures appear to be direct rather than mediated by the investigated visual and auditory neuropsychological mechanisms. The only significant indirect effect was found for the difference in accuracy between the left and right visual fields in visual-spatial cueing tasks, acting as a mediator for the effect of PUFA ratios on writing accuracy. Regression analyses, by contrast, confirmed the roles of phonological awareness and other visual attentional factors as predictors of reading and writing skills. Such results confirm the crucial role of visual-spatial attention mechanisms in reading and writing, and suggest that visual low-level mechanisms may be more sensitive to the effects of favorable conditions related to the presence of higher omega-3 blood levels.
Highlights
Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most common learning disabilities
Our aim was to test the hypothesis that the effect of polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) on reading and writing skills is mediated by neuropsychological functions such as phonemic awareness, magnocellular-related visual perception, visual-spatial attention (VSA), and executive functions
Participants with reading disorders were selected among patients of the neuropsychiatry unit of IRCCS “Eugenio Medea” in Bosisio Parini, Northern Italy, and typically developing children (TD) were recruited in the same geographic area among the schoolmates and friends of the children with DD, through sport centers or through social media
Summary
Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most common learning disabilities It is characterized by deficiencies in the acquisition of reading skills, despite there being no evidence of intellectual disability, or sensory or neurological deficiencies [1,2]. Some children with DD are unable to focus their visual attention normally or to elaborate the spatial relationships of visual information in a specific region of space [11,12]. These processes are often linked to the magnocellular system, i.e., the part of the visual system specialized in the processing of low-spatial-frequency and high-temporal-frequency stimuli
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