35 Percent of Dyslexic Adults Report Physical Abuse before the Age of 18

Statistics show that over 40 million American adults have some form of dyslexia; a language based learning disorder that can result in poor wording, word decoding, oral reading fluency and spelling. For some affected by the problem, they may also be at a greater risk for physical abuse at a young age. 

A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill found that adults with dyslexia were more likely to report physical abuse before they turned 18 than peers without the problem. In fact, findings published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence illustrated that around 35 percent of adults with dyslexia reported this issue. On the other hand, 7 percent of those without dyslexia did, also.

"Even after accounting for age, race, sex and other early adversities such as parental addictions, childhood physical abuse was still associated with a six-fold increase in the odds of dyslexia" said co-author Esme Fuller-Thomson, professor and Sandra Rotman Endowed Chair at University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, in a news release. 

The study authors examined a sample of 13,054 adults 18 and up from the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey, which included 1,020 respondents who reported that they had been physically abused during their childhood and another 77 who reported that they had been diagnosed by a health professional with dyslexia. 

"Our data do not allow us to know the direction of the association. It is possible that for some children, the presence of dyslexia and related learning problems may place them at relatively higher risk for physical abuse, perhaps due to adult frustrations with chronic learning failure" said study co-author, Stephen Hooper, professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, and Associate Dean and Chair of Allied Health Sciences at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. "Alternatively, given the known association between brain dysfunction and maltreatment, it could be that the experience of physical abuse may also contribute to and/or exacerbate such learning problems, secondary to increased neurologic burden.

"Although we do not know if the abuse-dyslexia association is causative, with one-third of adults with dyslexia reporting childhood abuse, it is important that primary health care providers and school-based practitioners working with children with dyslexia screen them for physical abuse."