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
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. 2025).
The link between childhood adversities and adult mental and physical health is well documented. Cognitive control was assumed to be a key factor in successfully dealing with cognitive-emotional challenges. In the present study we analyzed the contribution of cognitive control to stress resilience and mental health across the lifespan (Larra et al. 2024).
Cognitive aging is typically associated with a higher susceptibility to distraction by concurrent, but task-irrelevant stimuli. In the present study we explored ERP correlates of auditory distraction accros the lifespan and found that with age, orientation to distraction increases and reorientation to the primary task decreases (Getzmann et al. 2024).
The present study aims to clarify whether physical fitness is basically related to cognition and general intelligence in healthy adults, and whether higher levels of fitness are associated with better performance in the same cognitive functions in younger and older adults. The findings show that older adults benefit more from physical activity than younger adults (Gajewski et al. 2023).