Health Highlights: Aug. 7, 2008

Remedial instruction can help improve dyslexia-related reading problems, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

The study of 25 grade five students who were poor readers found that 100 hours of remedial instruction increased activity in several areas of the brain, and those gains solidified over the following year, United Press International reported.

"This study demonstrates how remedial instruction can use the plasticity of the human brain to gain an educational improvement," senior author Marcel Just said in a news release. "Focused instruction can help underperforming brain areas to increase their proficiency."

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The researchers also found evidence contradicting the common belief that dyslexia is primarily caused by problems with visual perception of letters, such as having trouble distinguishing between the letters "p" and "d". This kind of difficulty accounted for 10 percent of dyslexia cases in the study, while 70 percent of the children had problems relating the visual form of a letter to its sound, UPI reported.

The study appears in the journal Neuropsychologia.

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Procedure May Reduce Reliance on Anti-Rejection Drugs

A procedure that may limit transplant patients' reliance on powerful anti-rejection drugs has been developed by German researchers. Anti-rejection drugs can cause side effects and may not prevent the slow rejection of the new organ over time.

The new procedure involves mixing a patient's infection-fighting white blood cells with cells from the organ donor, in order to create specialized transplant acceptance-inducing cells (TAICs), which are injected into the transplant patient, BBC News reported.

Tests on 17 kidney transplant patients yielded promising results. In the first stage of clinical trials, 12 patients who received kidneys from deceased donors were given TAICs in addition to traditional anti-rejection drugs. Ten of the patients were gradually taken off a mix of anti-rejection drugs, and six eventually took only a low dose of a single drug.