di: DI and Neuroplasticity?

[Maureen Graves]

I am a parent-side special ed lawyer and not an expert on brain science -- I tend to think of brain as a black box we have yet to understand -- we can analyze inputs and outputs and correlations between them.  And showing an intervention changes the brain does necessarily help ensuring special ed  funding or provision -- it might encourage school districts to call interventions medical.  But that would be silly -- if there is a benefit to brain development from an intervention that enables (sometimes eventual) access to general education settings and curricula and/or meaningful outcomes, it doesn't hurt to have research showing the mechanism, and may help.


ANYWAY, medical insurance is where the money is -- services that are deemed outrageously expensive in education pale compared to insurance funded expenses.  ($5,000/month is outrageous for Comprehensive Behavioral Treatment for Young Children with Autism -- drop in the bucket medically.)   If it is possible to prove neurological improvement through DI, that would be cool.  It might open up insurance funding for DI for populations that have right to "mental health" (which includes autism treatment -- go figure!),especially language programs but also maybe academics, what with them changing the brain and all...  With insurance funding often comes the possibility of having things done better than in school systems, where staff appear to often want interventions that parents and advocates force on them to fail, so they can stop.  Evidence that DI improves brain functioning might encourage ABA providers that hate dealing with school districts more than they hate dealing with insurers to expand their course of intervention and use DI more in insurance-funded treatments.


What follows is my understanding of how "brain science" looks at/tries to validate interventions, which is based on  memories of articles, maybe one article, I read in 2010:  There is research about the brain effects of Lindamood-Bell (historically a multisensory, heavily kinesthetic way of remediating reading disabilities, though their new approach Seeing Stars seems to be more focused on fluency and orthographic memory).   What I have seen uses functional MRI that shows what parts of the brain "light up" during specific activities.  It purports to show that dyslexic readers use "wrong" parts of brain, that normal readers use "right parts" and read better, and that following remediation, dyslexic readers' patterns change to resemble those of normal readers, along with scores increasing in things like decoding, comprehension, and fluency.


The point of neuroplasticity is that brains can be, and are changed, through experience.  "Cognition" is not a given as to which school districts or medical providers or funders can disclaim responsibility.  There is a theory of autism out of the MIND Institute at UC-Davis that the disabilities commonly found in autism likely involve three "hits" -- genetic vulnerability (multi-gene involvement, maybe assortative mating facilitated by coeducation and feminism, older fathers, older mothers, etc.), environmental triggers (maybe birthing practices and some claim vaccines or more plausibly pesticides; others (like me) throw up hands as to which of many chemicals may not always lead to "better living), and different opportunities to learn once born (e.g., exclusion from playgroups; segregated preschools; "visual" approaches to reading instruction; etc.).  The latter go on and on and we can do something about them for people living with disabilities, for instance, providing efficient instruction in schools and medical treatment ??  via DI.


I have long been out of the loop on autism research funding, though I know some people in it.  This is a field that has wasted a lot of money.   I remember learning that findings on differences in hippocampus (?) size were unreliable because in the multicenter funded autism study, people used different camera angles.   Autism researchers angered many people with autism and families by an early focus on prenatal diagnosis.  There are bitter divisions about whether there has been too much vaccine research, or too little.


?A good study taking enough students for statistical significance (25, depending on effect size??), with similar profiles, some get DI and some don't, or some get DI now and some get it after six months, and doing pre- and post-DI functional MRIs during talking, reading and math could be very helpful, I think, for people with autism.  Of course, making sure that benefits of DI for less- and non-disabled populations would be important too.  Same principles seem to apply in terms of testing for "at risk" readers, "instructional failure" and absenteeism victims, and students identified as having specific learning disabilities.


Maureen Graves
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