Brightstar

Is Brightstar the answer for dyslexia?   I don't think so, but they are sure marketing to beat the band.  The sales pitch (I called this

summer) was pretty high-pressure, too, alleging that I was short-changing my child by denying her this treatment.

And it wasn't cheap -- at least $2,700 and a six-week program. I would be more enthusiastic about the Brightstar program if they'd opened up an office in Palo Alto and offered free investigational treatments to build up a big number of before-and-after test subjects, instead of charging the full fee for something that they only believe works.
Why are there so many bright kids who can't read? In this article,
A teacher reflects on her failure to teach dyslexic students

Rewiring the brain to treat dyslexia

After a lifetime of frustration with the printed word, Sam Savage at 60 took the pain out of reading by playing a computer game.

"I used to read the same sentence over and over, and then forget what sentence I was reading," said Savage, a consulting professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. "I'd always been a horrible reader - and I was terrible at spelling."

Savage has served as a research consultant for a new alternative treatment for dyslexia called BrightStar. Epoch Innovations of San Francisco, the primary investor in the neuroscience technology that is the underpinnings of BrightStar, opened its first United States center in Palo Alto in May.

Having scrutinized all the scientific data and taken the six-week program himself, Savage is cautiously upbeat.

"People are right to be skeptical, but I personally think the bottom line is there's a good chance that this stuff actually works," he said. "That doesn't mean I guarantee it - but I think there's something significant happening here."

The core of the program is a 20-minute session in front of a computer screen. On the screen is a black box with a simulated two-lane highway streaming through it.

The object of the game is to use the mouse to keep a lighted dot traveling in place along the highway as the road weaves in and out. In order to succeed in the game, the person must stay focused in the center of the screen - the area called the foveal vision.

However, while the game is playing, streaks of light are flashing by on the screen in the outer edges of the person's sight - the peripheral vision.

The interplay of nerves to and from the foveal and peripheral visions and the brain are thought to be important in dyslexia. In addition, the game and the light streaks are timed to correspond with the person's heartbeat in order to have maximum effect.

"If you're going to burn new neuropathways, you need to do it when the blood is in the brain," Savage explains.

What differentiates BrightStar from the legion of sometimes tedious tutoring and drilling programs already in place to help dyslexics is that it actually attempts to treat the suspected root cause of the problem: neurological differences in the cerebellum - a part of the brain - and in specific nerve pathways that carry certain types of visual information.

Epoch Innovations says the program aims at making corrections in three areas: eye tracking, weak electrochemical pathways from the eye to the brain and problems with the brain's timing system.

"What got me so excited about this technology is that there're no drugs, no implants," said Michael Fox of San Francisco, chief executive of Epoch Innovations. "We're using the body to help the body."

Fox, 36, a Philadelphia native, graduated from Stanford in 1991 with an engineering degree. Later, he worked at the investment bank Goldman Sachs in New York.

Since 1995, however, he has had an increasing interest in nontraditional health care.

"I hooked up with the BrightStar scientific team in 1999," he said. "They tested it until 2003, when the first center opened in the United Kingdom." About 1,500 children and adults have taken BrightStar since then, Fox said. The program is marketed in the U.K. by London-based BrightStar Learning Ltd.

The program consists of two 20-minute computer sessions weekly for either six weeks or 12 weeks, plus tutoring sessions that are customized according to the child's or adult's needs. Each person undergoes extensive testing before, during and after the program, which costs about $2,700 for the six-week plan.

Sunny Armas of Santa Clara said his son, Bobby, 14, used to shun books and "he would avoid reading at any cost - it was a major task."

Bobby, now in eighth grade, was formerly three or four grades behind in his reading level while attending school in the San Joaquin Valley. The family moved to the Bay Area last year, partly because Armas and his wife, Genia, wanted a better educational environment for their son, Armas said.

One day, he heard a radio ad for BrightStar, and decided to give it a try. Bobby started his first six-week course in January.

"Something clicked right away - he noticed a change, he could focus more," Armas said. "He's happier now because his homework is not as hard as it was before - he has more control."

Bobby last month completed a second six-week program at BrightStar, Armas added. He signed Bobby up for the second course "just so he can keep on top of it." His son has turned into an avid reader of everything from Harry Potter books to Time magazine articles.

"I don't really care what he reads, as long as he's reading," Armas said. "I want to do whatever's necessary to have him succeed in life on his own accord."

According to the BrightStar Web site, 78 percent of students improved a full year or more in at least one test of key reading skills - including word identification, word attack, reading comprehension and reading fluency. The company claims the average student improves 2.13 grade levels in one or more of those tests by the end of the program.

However, other Bay Area dyslexia experts question whether Brightstar's results will last over time. The company has not published any long-term statistics, said Ron Davis, of the Davis Dyslexia Association International in Burlingame.

"In my opinion, any technique for addressing dyslexia is only as good its permanent effect," said Davis, who offers his own dyslexia program and who is author of two books on the subject. "In the past 25 years, there have been a half-dozen different techniques that claimed to be the solution to dyslexia - but the initial results were not long-lasting."

Abigail Marshall, author of "The Everything Parent's Guide to Children with Dyslexia" (Adams Media 2004), and webmaster for the Davis program's Web site, www.dyslexia.com, said she was skeptical about BrightStar's research statistics.

"Although BrightStar claims to be scientifically based, it is supported by a single study of 35 dyslexic adults, including some assigned to a placebo group," Marshall says in a report. She also says the company's claims on numbers for reading grade level improvements are inconsistent.

According to Savage, however, who analyzed data from the U.K. BrightStar center, the results were "striking" in the dramatic improvements they showed. In one set of data analyzed by Savage, only 13 percent of about 300 students were rated very low on a dyslexic scale before the program. After the program, that number had jumped to 33 percent.

The company says the data has been certified by the accounting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers.

"An easy way to get results like this would have been to remove all the people who didn't get better," Savage said. "But Price Waterhouse Coopers has certified that the data is complete."

Savage said he would have found the results even more convincing had the before and after tests been administered by non-BrightStar personnel. However, having been through the program himself, he doubts that the resulting scores could have been manipulated in such a way to produce such strong results.

"They might have been able to fudge it a little, but I don't think they could have fudged this much," he said.

The company does offer a money-back guarantee if the client does not progress sufficiently in reading skills during the program.

Savage had one key reading score - reading efficiency - progress from the 21st percentile to the 77th percentile after taking the BrightStar course. Like many other children years ago, Savage was never diagnosed as dyslexic because "they didn't have the word back then.

"I got D's in English for three out of four years in high school," Savage said. "I had some issues."

Later, as a professor, he remembers occasionally writing letters out of order on the blackboard during his lectures.

"Sometimes I would write down a letter on the board ahead of a letter that was supposed to come before it," he said. When reading on his own, he would get so sleepy he would be unable to keep focusing on the words.

After the fourth week of the six-week program at BrightStar, Savage was reading a patent application as he flew home from Chicago - an activity that normally would have had him pushin' zzzs even before takeoff. This time, however, Savage read through the whole application and stayed alert to remember what he had read.

"It made me more conscious of my daydreaming state, and allowed me to gain better control of my mind," Savage said.

Oddly enough, the breakthrough came when Savage, an accomplished and avid skier, spontaneously realized that he could approach reading the same way as he did in preparing to take a run down a black diamond slope at Alpine Meadows.

"I discovered through BrightStar that I could focus my consciousness in the same way when I'm reading that I do when I'm skiing," he said.

Fox, who is in the process of talks with potential strategic partners to expand the use of BrightStar, said he has seen firsthand how dyslexia causes an insidious erosion of self-esteem. A childhood friend and his sister suffered from the condition, which in the past has often stigmatized children as retarded or disabled even though they are of normal intelligence.

"Fifty percent of prisoners are dyslexic, and one-third of all high-school dropouts," he said. "Some 60 percent to 80 percent of people in drug and alcohol rehab units are dyslexic."

It is thought to affect as many as 30 million to 45 million children and adults in the United States, according to an Epoch Innovations report.

"The self-esteem issues are huge," Fox said. "If you have people who believe in you when you're a kid, perhaps you can get by and be successful in life.

"But if you're low income, with no resources, what do you do?" Fox added. "How many throw-away kids, operating below capacity, do we need to have?"

They are right about the self-esteem issues, though.  There's a huge reservoir of shame if you can't read fluently and quickly -- unless you know that it is your dyslexia, and are self-confident about it.

Comments

[Chris Tregenza]

I agree with your assessment of Brightstar's research. At the moment it is weak but does show some potential. The biggest short coming of all their published data is the lack of long-term follow up. Accepting at fact value Brightstar's claim of an average of 11 month improvement after a 6 week course of treatment, the big question is does the child keep improving until they catch up with their age group? If they do, then Brightstar offers real hope. If not then its as ineffective as most reading based programmes.
You are also right in highlighting that self-esteem can be severely damaged by learning difficulties. However it is important not to fall in the trap of thinking that Dyslexia is a problem of low self-esteem. A recent study has shown that self-esteem has little to do with academic success. The problems of dyslexia are deep rooted in neurology and reading / writing problems are just a symptom of this.

[Bhavin]

You rlelay just enlightened me on this topic I know a few people who are dyslexic but I never rlelay knew THAT much about it. I'm happy to be more informed now.