Apathy and depression in cross-cultural survivors of traumatic brain injury

The disturbance of motivation and its relationship to depression continues to spark contradictory findings among European and North American populations. Could a cross-cultural study shed some light on the situation? This study aims to detect the prevalence of apathy and to test whether the Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES) can spot the presence or absence of depression in survivors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in Oman. Eighty subjects who sustained a TBI were given an Arabic version of the AES and were also interviewed with the semistructured Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI). The authors found that the incidence of apathy and depression among Omani people who sustained TBI is similar to that reported elsewhere. The AES has poor discriminatory power in identifying cases of depression. These findings emphasize the importance of developing assessment tools that are culturally sensitive in light of the rising incidence of TBI in developing countries such as Oman.