VITA Vienna Transdanube Aging study

The Vienna Transdanube Aging study (VITA) is a prospective cohort of people born between May 1925 and June 1926 who lived in the 21st and 22nd districts of Vienna, on the east bank of the Danube. Run by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Aging Research and the Danube Hospital, it asks which measures at age 75 predict later dementia. The design paper names eight candidate predictors, two of them from MRI: hippocampal atrophy and atrophy of the substantia innominata. Participants had a day-long examination with interviews, neuropsychological tests, psychiatric and neurological scales, blood and genetic markers, and a cranial MRI, and were invited back every 30 months. The scans have not been released publicly; one VITA paper offers its analysis data on reasonable request to the authors.

Composition

About 1,745 residents of the target age were invited, and between 36.7% and 44.3% took part. A baseline brain MRI was obtained for 532 participants aged 75 between May 2000 and November 2002, of whom 318 were women. Later papers report slightly different baseline numbers (for example 503 with complete neurological work-up including MRI), so the exact size of the imaging set depends on the analysis. Follow-up visits at 30 and 60 months repeated the MRI. A subsample that died at the Danube Hospital also had brain autopsies, and 68 of them had both MRI and neuropathology.

Acquisition

For the autopsy subsample the documented protocol was a 1.0 T Siemens Impact Expert with a circularly polarized head coil: coronal 3D T1-weighted MPRAGE at 1 mm, a T2-weighted turbo spin echo, a transverse proton density series and a thin inversion recovery series of the olfactory region.

Annotations

The released papers describe radiological ratings rather than voxel labels: medial temporal lobe atrophy, white matter lesion and lacune grades, Evans index, incidental meningiomas (9 at baseline, all in women) and FreeSurfer regional measures. Clinical labels include mild cognitive impairment and dementia diagnoses by NINCDS-ADRDA criteria at follow-up, and NIA-AA neuropathology scores for the autopsy subsample.

Known limitations

• No public release, no website and no published data use terms; access depends on the investigators.
• A single birth year from one urban area of Austria, so age has almost no variance.
• Low field strength (1.0 T).
• The scan protocol is only documented in detail for the autopsy subsample.