Cross-Cultural Research on Alzheimer's Disease: A Critical Review

Abstract

This paper reviews cross-cultural contributions to the study of Alzheimer's disease (AD) from the fields of epidemiology, psychology, and genetics. The growth of this literature in the last decade follows the development of reliable diagnostic criteria, measures of caregiver burden, and new methods for identifying AD genotypes. The paper shows the dominance of a perspective across specialties that represents AD as a disease that can be reliably identified independently from cultural context. The implications of this perspective are discussed in terms of how a neglect to account for indigenous interpretations of AD undermines the validity and usefulness of current findings. The paper proposes that ethnographic accounts of local interpretations of AD symptoms, caregiver burden, and genetics can contribute to the development of culturally sensitive instruments and the assessment of the psychosocial impact of genetic research across culture.