Differences between East and West may affect dementia studies: Thoughts from the KSA dementia prevalence study

Abstract

While science is the same in the East and West, certain personal characteristics may distort scientific results. This is more likely in the East. An example may be a recent project in the East that measured the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease dementia in a very large group. They found it to be near 1%, which seems very low. Studies that show a low prevalence of Alzheimer's disease dementia could be due to an examination of a very healthy group with very few older people, and/or poor/inaccurate testing (none of which were in this study). Another possibility is that the person, their family or their doctor aim at ignoring or hiding a diagnosis of dementia.