Question: Do you think it's really possible to create a generic tool for assessing dementia?

Nadine Mirza answered on 8 Nov 2018:

That’s a good question. I think it would be rather difficult because language and culture heavily influences how we perform on these tools and obviously people all over the world speak different languages and have different cultures.
Dementia tools have to assess something called cognitive domains- these are our different mental abilities. Attention, memory, language and spatial awareness are all cognitive domains. Dementia can impact cognitive domains in different ways- it may damage some, leave some unharmed- it differs from person to person.
Dementia tools tell us how well someone is doing across their different cognitive domains and if certain domains are quite poor it can indicate dementia.
Now- you could have a generic tool for a test that was only checking spatial awareness cause that is just seeing if people can copy shapes drawn in front of them and stuff like that. culture and language has no influence.
but if you were testing the language or memory cognitive domain, which is so important, you would need to account for a person’s language and culture.
so instead of creating one generic tool it’s best to create different versions of a tool. that’s what I’ve done for a tool called the ACE-III. It was originally made in English for Australia. I took it and made an Urdu version of it for the UK and an Urdu version for Pakistan. You can see, it’s not enough just to translate it into one language- I had to account for the cultural differences in both countries and make separate versions.