AfriBCD Seminar Series: A Call for Shifting from the Western to African Neuropsychology, the African Neuropsychology Battery

Our invited speaker is Dr. Jean Ikanga. Jean is an Instructor at Emory University School of Medicine in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. He is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Kinshasa, School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, as well at the Catholic University of Congo School of Medicine. He is doing executive MPH at Emory School of Public Health in epidemiology. He trained as a clinical neuropsychologist at Emory University School of Medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Anthony Stringer. He received an NIH/NIA supplement under the mentorship of Dr. Levey and to work in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of the Emory Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC). His contributions to science include the creation and validation of African Neuropsychological Battery (ANB) with Dr. Anthony Stringer. His field of research is the use of cognitive and plasma biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in Sub-Saharan Africa/Democratic Republic of Congo. He is also a co-investigator in a longitudinal NIH/NIA study on the Measurement and analysis of aging, Cognition and Alzheimer’s Disease, and Related Dementia Risk Factors at Midlife in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS).

In this talk, I will begin by motivating the need to create an African cognitive assessment battery, by broadly examining shared aspects of African culture that differ from Western culture. I will then introduce and provide an overview of the African Neuropsychological Battery (ANB). I will share results on the reliability and internal consistency of the ANB, and highlight its sensitivity to demographic factors, enculturation, and neuropathologies. In the final part of this talk, I will discuss linking cognitive performance on the ANB to neuroimaging metrics, and its sensitivity to discriminate biomarkers present in neurodegenerative disorders.