In Lebanon, a country where 15 years of civil war and economic collapse have left deep scars, older people are aging under conditions that gerontology textbooks never covered. Memory and thinking have gone almost unstudied here: there was no instrument that could measure them as reliably as in Europe or the United States. Researchers from the American University of Beirut took the international HCAP battery (a set of tests for assessing memory, speech and attention) and adapted it for an Arabic-speaking population for the first time.
Scientists translated the tests into the Lebanese dialect, replaced the letters used for verbal fluency with Arabic equivalents, and allowed people to name landmarks instead of addresses. 3027 people over 60 from Beirut and the Bekaa Valley completed a 30-45-minute battery covering five domains: orientation, memory, language, visuospatial skills and executive function. The data were then checked with confirmatory factor analysis to see whether the tests really measure a general cognitive level and its five components.
The compass that at the start of the journey pointed to an unknown north is now calibrated. Lebanese doctors and researchers can use it in clinics and research projects, and neighboring Arab countries can adapt it for their own dialects. So from a single study grows a regional data network that will help us understand how the brain ages under conditions where clocks do not measure time but give it.
Lebanon has no standardized addresses, so the question "Where are you?" had to be rephrased: participants could name the nearest landmark, such as a mosque or a market. The analogy of a clock that "measures time" did not work, because in the local context a clock "gives time."
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.