Welcome to the Dortmund Vital Study on healthy cognitive aging!
The Dortmund Vital Study (DVS) is a longitudinal, population-based cohort study on determinants and consequences of cognitive aging.
The DVS aims to identify influences of biological, lifestyle and environmental factors on physical and mental health across the lifespan and to develop new possibilities for early detection of cognitive decline in aging. The study will shed light on sources of interindividual differences in the alterations of cognitive functioning with increasing age and reveal biological and lifestyle markers contributing to work ability, longevity, and healthy aging. A special focus is on the influences of work and work activity. But also risk factors for cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment, or even dementia will be evaluated.
The DVS is a multidisciplinary study of the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors at the Technical University of Dortmund (IfADo) in Germany, involving the Departments of Ergonomics, Immunology, Psychology and Neurosciences, and Toxicology, as well as numerous national and international collaboration partners.
The study has been registered at Clinicaltrials.gov NCT05155397 and a study protocol of the DVS has been published in JMIR Research Protocols.
You are a scientist and interested in the DVS? Do you have questions about the methodology or the collected data? You would like to realize a scientific project with the DVS data? Here you will find answers to your questions or contact us directly: dvs@ifado.de.
Recent articles
Personality traits describe stable differences in how people think, feel and behave, and how they interact with and experience their social and physical environments. Here we meta-analyse data across 46 cohorts comprising up to 1.14 million participants for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of the Big Five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience (Schwaba et al., Nature 2026).
Chronotype represents individual differences in circadian preferences that influence sleep-wake patterns, cognitive performance. Given its growing relevance for clinical research and application, efficient and reliable chronotype assessment is essential. Here, we used the Morningness–Eveningness-Questionnaire (MEQ) and identified item-level predictive hierarchies and response patterns distinguishing morning, neutral, and evening types (Metzler et al., Sci Rep, 2026).
White matter microstructure is a candidate neurobiological substrate underlying individual differences in fluid intelligence, potentially through differences in neural information transfer. Here, the primary objective was to derive measurement models for markers of white matter integrity and myelin content across 52 tracts grouped into 10 functional clusters to explore neuronal underpinnigs of fluid intelligence (Jungeblut et al., Imaging Neurosci, 2026).
Occupational burnout is a complex disease resulting from physiological responses to external stressors. In the present study we analyzed the association between burnout severity and hair cortisol and asked whether work ability, personality, depressive symptoms and stress-related immunological biomarkers affect this relationship across the working lifespan (Gajewski et al., Brain Behav Immun Health 2025).