Increased Resting-State Functional Connectivity in the Cingulo-Opercular Cognitive-Control Network after Intervention in Children with Reading Difficulties.

Mark Difrancesco,Lawrence M Ward,Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus,Claudio Toro-Serey

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0133762

Mark Difrancesco, Lawrence M Ward + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133762

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Jul 21, 2015
Citations: 67	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

Abstract

Dyslexia, or reading difficulty, is characterized by slow, inaccurate reading accompanied by executive dysfunction. Reading training using the Reading Acceleration Program improves reading and executive functions in both children with dyslexia and typical readers. This improvement is associated with increased activation in and functional connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex, part of the cingulo-opercular cognitive-control network, and the fusiform gyrus during a reading task after training. The objective of the current study was to determine whether the training also has an effect on functional connectivity of the cingulo-opercular and fronto-parietal cognitive-control networks during rest in children with dyslexia and typical readers. Fifteen children with reading difficulty and 17 typical readers (8-12 years old) were included in the study. Reading and executive functions behavioral measures and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected before and after reading training. Imaging data were analyzed using a graphical network-modeling tool. Both reading groups had increased reading and executive-functions scores after training, with greater gains among the dyslexia group. Training may have less effect on cognitive control in typical readers and a more direct effect on the visual area, as previously reported. Statistical analysis revealed that compared to typical readers, children with reading difficulty had significantly greater functional connectivity in the cingulo-opercular network after training, which may demonstrate the importance of cognitive control during reading in this population. These results support previous findings of increased error-monitoring activation after reading training in children with dyslexia and confirm greater gains with training in this group.

Highlights

Reading difficulty (RD), or dyslexia, is a deficit in acquiring fluent reading skills despite remedial intervention and repeated exposure to written language [1]
The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect of the RAP training on functional connectivity of the fronto-parietal and cingulo-opercular cognitive-control networks in children with RD and TRs during rest
The combined change in global efficiency of both the cingulo-opercular and fronto-parietal networks was positively correlated with improved reading following the RAP training in children with RD

Summary

Introduction

Reading difficulty (RD), or dyslexia, is a deficit in acquiring fluent reading skills despite remedial intervention and repeated exposure to written language [1]. It has been reported that individuals with RD share difficulties in attention [9,10,11] speed of processing [12], inhibition [3], working memory [5, 13], and set-shifting [14],as well as in error monitoring in the linguistic [15, 16] and non-linguistic domains [14, 17]. The findings that individuals with RD share deficits in cognitive abilities underlying reading (i.e., in EF) have been supported by several neuroimaging studies. Other neuroimaging studies support the role of visual attention in particular [20] and EF in general [21] in individuals with RD

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