Clinical dementia rating workshop: The Asian experience

The CDR is a clinically useful informant-based global dementia assessment scale to detect the presence and severity of dementia. It has been adopted widely throughout Asia for practice and research. Cultural differences between Western and Asian societies require adaptation of the semistructured interviews with the informant to be consonant with local influences. For example, the CDR method for Asian older adults must be modified to accommodate the high rate of illiteracy, the restricted lifestyles with lack of participation in cognitively demanding everyday tasks (especially for men), the concern of informants about elders being aware that they are reporting observations about them, and cultural differences in the conceptualization of dementia. Nonetheless, the CDR with appropriate modifications has good interrater reliability and should be appropriate for global staging of dementia in clinical trials of antidementia drugs in Asia.