Selecting the most suitable instruments, thus less influenced by cultural aspects such as ethnicity, language, schooling, literacy, for the diagnostic framing of migrants with cognitive disorders.
In this area, as part of the Immidem Study Group, the Centre for the Treatment and Study of Cognitive Disorders at the Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan, Italy, translated into Italian and validated the cross-cultural cognitive assessment scale Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale- RUDAS (developed by the Danish Dementia Research Centre-DDRC), which is now available together with the Administration and Assessment Guide.
The RUDAS has certain advantages over other cognitive screening tests such as less need for linguistic and cultural adaptation and less variability in test performance in the presence of different educational levels of the patients.
Immidem (Dementia in immigrants and ethnic minorities: clinical-epidemiological aspects and public health perspective) is a project co-ordinated by the Italian National Institute of Health and financed by the Italian Ministry of Health, whose aim is to provide health professionals with tools for the cross-cultural cognitive assessment of people with a history of migration.