Brain Development And Celiac Disease

[gayle and madison]

My daughter is 5 years old and was diagonosed with celiac when she was 21 months old. As I look back I think she had symptoms when she was one year old. She is having trouble in pre-school with learning her alphabet. I was wondering if anyone knows what part of the brain is developing in the second year of life. If this has any link to her having trouble with her alphabet.

[Mother of Jibril]

I'm sure it makes you worry... wondering about the long-term impact on your daughter. My eight-month-old son had meningitis this summer (thankfully the viral kind, which is rarely fatal) and I definitely worry about whether there will be any long-term effects!

I also have a daughter who's three years old. Her preschool has the three, four, and five-year-olds in the same classroom... at that age there is SO much variation in kids' abilities and interests. Are there are other things your daughter is interested in? Books, cartoons, dress-up, imaginative play, physical play...? If she's showing normal development (or even above-average development) in some other areas, I guess I wouldn't worry too much about letters. Maybe she just isn't quite ready yet. Have her teachers expressed any concerns to you?

[taweavmo3]

I only have my experience to go by......my daughter was diagnosed at 3, and before that time she starting showing symptoms a little after 12 months.

By the time she entered pre-k, she was behind the other kids. Her teachers recommended we wait a year to send her to kindergarten b/c she had very little alphabet or number recognition, and there were other issues. We decided to have her evaluated by a developmental pediatrician (which wasn't cheap, but well worth it). At that evaluation, she also had a thorough speech eval too. It turned out she has a receptive/expressive delay, and after a summer of one-on-one speech therapy, everything "clicked" and she was finally able to retain numbers and letters. She was also anemic, which can also cause learning difficulties, so we corrected that as well.

She ended up doing fine in kindergarten, and she is in first grade now, reading above grade level. She does struggle with math, but I am told that is related to the expressive/receptive delay and will likely always be a problem area for her. If you had told me back when she was in pre-k that she would be doing so good at this point, I would not have believed it!

If possible, you might consider getting a developmental evaluation just to cover all your bases. A speech therapist once told me that between the ages of 0-3, kids learn to speak. After age 3, they speak to learn, so any sort of underlying speech issues get in the way of learning basic fundamental skills. We knew my dd had articulation problems, but the receptive/expressive delay was not obvious to us in any way.

Hope that helps some.....who knows, everything could just click one day, and you won't have to worry at all!

[chrissy2]

  gayle and madison said:

My daughter is 5 years old and was diagonosed with celiac when she was 21 months old. As I look back I think she had symptoms when she was one year old. She is having trouble in pre-school with learning her alphabet. I was wondering if anyone knows what part of the brain is developing in the second year of life. If this has any link to her having trouble with her alphabet.

[Kibbie]

  gayle and madison said:

My daughter is 5 years old and was diagonosed with celiac when she was 21 months old. As I look back I think she had symptoms when she was one year old. She is having trouble in pre-school with learning her alphabet. I was wondering if anyone knows what part of the brain is developing in the second year of life. If this has any link to her having trouble with her alphabet.

I'm not sure what part develops when but most kids make gains in one area at a time in learning (I'm an English teacher ... or was before my daughter was born). It's possible that she is making her educational gains in math skills, language skills, drawing etc and the rest is lacking right now.... if that's the case it will all eventually level out.

If you are still having issues, hearing, vision, and possibly a learning disability should be looked into all of wich can be easy fixes