WESTERN Australian Centre for Health and Ageing Professor Leon Flicker says older Kimberley Aboriginal people have a prevalence of dementia five times as high as non-aboriginal Australians.
Gerontologists working in the Kimberley have devised a series of tests for dementia, suitable for Aboriginal people from remote communities.
Western Australian Centre for Health and Ageing fellow Dr Kate Smith and National Ageing Research Institute Melbourne clinical Associate Professor Dina LoGiudice applied the new tests to a random sample of 363 Indigenous people aged 45 and over in Derby and in six Aboriginal communities.
Professor Flicker says this was the first time a meaningful dementia survey of Aborigines had been conducted.
He says the researchers had to devise an appropriate methodology for the group.
“About 40 per cent had had less than one year of education or no schooling at all,” he says.
“The pen-and-paper questionnaires weren’t really suitable for people who have very little education and live an indigenous lifestyle, so it just wasn’t possible to assess cognitive impairment using the standard tools or instruments.”
The new tests, called Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment (KICA), substituted different tests such as animal picture recognition and recall for written words, and included oral questions about matters of common cultural knowledge such as whether or not it was pension week.
He says the results showed a high dementia and cognitive impairment rate among remote Aboriginal people who were relatively young.
“We were told [anecdotally] that you might find more cognitive impairment associated with alcohol and that wasn’t what we found,” he says.
Instead, the researchers found positive correlation with head injury, gender, and factors contributing to vascular dysfunction such as smoking, diabetes, high blood-pressure and poor nutrition.
He says the encouraging aspect to the findings was that most of these contributing factors were preventable.
“One of the important things is there you can do something about [contributing factors] so it’s not hopeless,” he says.
He agreed, for example, that Aboriginal people in mourning are no longer expected to hit their heads with sharp stones when learning of a relative’s death.
“Head injury … may be one of the factors associated with high rates of cognitive impairment and dementia,” he says.
“Avoiding head injury is an important aspect for prevention as is the treatment of high blood pressure, looking at good nutrition, and decreasing the risk of diabetes and other factors.”
