ICMR develops MUDRA Toolbox in five Indian languages to examine dementia patients

In a move to expand the care and outreach to people suffering from dementia, the Indian Council Of Medical Research (ICMR) on Wednesday, October 5 released the Multilingual Dementia Research and Assessment (MUDRA) Toolbox in five Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

MUDRA Toolbox is a project led by the ICMR Neuro-Cognitive Tool Box (ICMR-NCTB) partnership to improve dementia and mild cognitive impairment research and therapeutic practices in India. NIMHANS (Bengaluru), AIIMS (New Delhi), SCTIMST (Thiruvananthapuram), NIMS (Hyderabad), Apollo Hospital (Kolkata), Manipal Hospital (Bengaluru), and Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College collaborated on the project.

ICMR develops MUDRA Toolbox to examine Dementia in the country

On the official launch of the toolbox, Dr Balram Bhargava, Director General of ICMR said,

"The validated MUDRA Toolbox is available now in various Indian languages Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. This was one of the crucial needs for undertaking uniform, standardized dementia research in the country.”

He went on to say that the toolkit has several cognitive tests that can be used to examine many aspects of cognition, including executive functioning, memory, speech, and visuospatial functions. Dr R S Dhaliwal, Head-NCD, told ANI that it is a one-of-a-kind instrument that consists of multiple tests and questionnaires, and is sensitive to the elements that affect cognitive test performance, such as education, language, and culture.

"ICMR commissioned a multi-disciplinary study with a group of researchers from several professions, including neurologists, psychologists, and speech-language pathologists, to construct a culturally, educationally, and linguistically relevant neurocognitive toolbox," Dhaliwal explained.

Rising Dementia cases in India

Dementia is a neurological illness that affects a person's ability to perform activities of daily living and creates a loss in memory. The initiative comes at a time when India has over 5.29 million persons living with dementia, according to the Alzheimer's and Related Disorders Society of India (ARDSIDementia).

By 2030, the number of dementia patients is predicted to reach 7.61 million. Despite the country's high dementia prevalence, only one out of every 10 people with dementia gets diagnosed in India owing to a lack of awareness and diagnostic tools.

With ANI inputs

Image: ANI/ Unsplash