Children With Language Problems May Also Suffer From Behavioral Disorders, Study Says

Children often struggle with several words, sentences and sounds early in life. It is usually considered as a part of their developmental stage. But some kids may have to make extra efforts to say a few things even after crossing certain milestones and it is alarming.

These children could be struggling with speech or language disorder and it could be a hint about their mental health problems or behavioral issues, according to a new study. It stated that there is a possible genetic link between language problems and emotional or behavioral issues.

The study, led by a group of researchers from the University of York, was published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research. It looked into the genetic variants in six genes that are likely to contribute to the language development of a child.

The researchers used a statistical technique called Polygenic Scoring, which is used to add up the effects of different genetic variants, for determining whether there is an association between children’s poor mental health and their language. The academics found the genetic variants that contribute to a child’s language are tied to the kid’s emotional or behavioral problems. They also found that speech disorder could be a symptom of poor mental health issues.

“This study provides very preliminary evidence that children with language disorders, such as developmental language disorder (DLD), may experience poor mental health due to shared biological mechanisms,” lead researcher Umar Toseeb said in a statement.

“This means that children with DLD may have poor mental health because the genes that are responsible for building neural systems responsible for language might also be responsible for mental health,” Toseeb added.

For the study, the researchers analyzed genetic data of more than 5,000 children with language problem along with their clinical assessments on speech ability and their parental responses to questionnaires.

“If our findings are confirmed in future work, it could mean that, rather than wait for children with developmental language disorder to show symptoms of poor mental health before intervening, mental health support is put in place as soon as language difficulties become apparent, as a preventative measure,” the lead researcher said.

Meanwhile, first author Dianne Newbury, from the Department of Biological and Medical Sciences at Oxford Brookes University, said this was the first study demonstrating the genetic effects of language on mental health problems.

“But they need to be replicated in larger independent datasets to confirm the findings,” Newbury said, adding, “We looked at genetic variation across six genes, but there are many thousands more in the human genome that we did not investigate, so these results only represent a subset of the relevant networks. The study illustrates the complexity of language related genetic networks and shows that this is an area that should be investigated further.”