Dorly J H Deeg

Amsterdam University Medical Center | VUmc · Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics/LASA

In prospective studies on religiousness and depressive symptoms, it remains unclear whether religiousness is a predictor or parallels the fluctuating course of depressive symptoms. The current study focuses on several affective aspects of religiousness in their associations over time with late life depressive symptoms. As part of the population-bas...

Background and Objectives 'Blue Zones' (BZs) are regions with exceptionally high numbers of longevous inhabitants. Several factors have been suggested to promote longevity in BZs, but the evidence generally does not meet scientific quality criteria. We aimed to characterize a municipality as a ‘relative BZ’, satisfying three criteria: compared to o...

Objectives: To gain insight into the longitudinal, reciprocal associations between depressive symptoms and sexual satisfaction as well as the potential moderating roles of gender and perceived importance of sexuality. Method: We analyzed longitudinal data from 2113 participants of the Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam (LASA) with an initial ag...

Background The well-known disablement process has been conceptualized as a series of transitions between progressive states of functional decline. We studied joint patterns of change within disablement states defined as walking speed, grip strength, and self-reported disability. Methods 1702 participants aged 65 and over were included from the Lon...

Background Peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) predicts mortality and other negative health outcomes. However, little evidence exists on how PEFR changes with ageing and how trajectories of change differ among older people. Aims To identify trajectories of PEFR in older men and women, and to study characteristics associated with these trajectories....

This study set out to evaluate the association between job demands at baseline and physical performance over a six-year period across three cohorts of older Dutch workers examined 10 years apart. Data were drawn from three cohorts (1992–1999, 2002–2009 and 2012–2019) of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. Individuals aged 55–65 years from each...

Objective: A growing literature suggests that neighbourhood characteristics are associated with mental health outcomes, but the evidence in older adults is inconsistent. We investigated the association of neighbourhood characteristics, pertaining to demographic, socio-economic, social and physical environment domains, with the subsequent 10-year i...

Purpose We examined health trajectories of Dutch older workers across their exit from the workforce in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, testing the hypothesis that pre-post-exit health trajectories of workers with favourable and unfavourable working conditions increasingly diverged over time due to policy measures to extend working life. Methods The L...

Older Turkish and Moroccan immigrants are often ascribed a low social position based on their relatively unfavourable educational level, occupational status and income. Yet immigrants emigrated to improve their social position and came from contexts where determinants of social position might be based on different socio-cultural circumstances than...

Background Female older workers generally leave the work force earlier than men. Depressive symptoms are a risk factor of early work exit and are more common in women. To extend working lives, pathways leading to these sex inequalities need to be identified. The aim of this study was to investigate the association of sex and gender with depressive...

Background: In many Western countries, the state pension age is being raised to stimulate the extension of working lives. It is not yet well understood whether the health of older adults supports this increase. In this study, future health of Dutch adults aged 60 to 68 (i.e., the expected state pension age) is explored up to 2040. Methods: Data...

Background Resilience refers to the process in which people function well despite adversity. Persistent severe pain may be considered an adversity in people with lower limb osteoarthritis (LLOA). The objectives of this study are: (1) to identify what proportion of older adults with LLOA and persistent severe pain show good functioning; and (2) to e...

Sexual well-being refers to the evaluation of one’s sexuality. We examined the association of enjoyment of sexuality with longevity and the moderating role of perceived importance of sexuality in this association. In the population-based Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam, the survival of initially 55–84-year-olds was followed during 27 years. Com...

Background The prodromal phase of Parkinson’s disease (PD) can last up to 20 years and is characterized by a variety of non-motor symptoms. Objective To determine the prevalence of a selection of non-motor symptoms known to be associated with an increased risk of developing PD in a late middle-aged population-based sample and to determine their as...

Introduction Age-related declines in multiple facets of sexuality in later life are well documented. However, most studies have been cross-sectional with data collected at one point in time, leaving questions about cohort differences and interrelated historical changes in physical health and psychosocial functioning unanswered. Methods We examined...

Observed increases in retirement age are generally attributed to policies to extend working lives (PEW). In a quasi-experimental design, we examine to what extent increases in employment of older workers can be attributed to secular changes in individual characteristics as opposed to PEW. We compare two countries: one with clear PEW (the Netherland...

Introduction Age-related declines in multiple facets of sexuality in later life are well documented. However, most studies have been cross-sectional with data collected at one point in time, leaving questions about cohort differences and interrelated historical changes in physical health and psychosocial functioning unanswered. Methods We examined...

The funding note in the original publication of this article was missing.

This study examines occupation-based differences in life expectancy and the extent to which health accounts for these differences. Twentyseven-year survival follow-up data were used from the Dutch population-based Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (n = 2,531), initial ages 55–85 years. Occupation was based on longest-held job. Results show that th...

There is an increasing awareness that replication should become common practice in empirical studies. However, study results might fail to replicate for various reasons. The robustness of published study results can be assessed using the relatively new multiverse-analysis methodology, in which the robustness of the effect estimates against data ana...

Objectives: This study compares the associations of two subjective lifetime perspectives, subjective age (SA) and subjective life expectancy (SLE), with physical performance, self-rated health, and depressive symptoms. Methods: 64 91-year-old participants were selected from three waves of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (2008/09, 2011/12, 20...

Older adults with lower limb osteoarthritis (LLOA) are highly dependent on their physical and social environment for being physically active. Longitudinal data from 2286 older adults (Mage = 73.8 years; 50.3% female) in six European countries were analyzed using cross-lagged Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and multi-group SEM. In cross-sectional...

The aim of the current study was to investigate trends in frailty and its relationship with mortality among older adults aged 64-84 years across a period of 21 years. Data from 1995 to 2016 were used from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. A total of 7,742 observations of 2,874 respondents in the same age range (64-84 years) across six measure...

Introduction: Frailty can be seen as a continuum, from fit to frail. While many recent studies have focused on frailty, much less attention has been paid to the other end of the continuum: the group of older adults that remain (relatively) vital. Moreover, there is a lack of studies on frailty and vitality that investigate predictors from multiple...

Samenvatting Door de recente verhoging van de AOW-leeftijd in Nederland is een nieuwe groep ontstaan: de betaald werkenden tussen de oude AOW-leeftijd van 65 jaar en de nieuwe AOW-leeftijd, de ‘65-pre-AOW’ers’. In een eerste kenschets van deze groep vergelijken wij hun werk- en individuele kenmerken met die van de 61-64-jarige werkers, de ‘61-64’er...

To be able to extend working lives, maintaining good health in older workers is important. The aim of the present study was to identify which work characteristics are associated with physical and mental health outcomes in older workers in the Netherlands, and particularly whether there are educational differences in these associations. We used long...

Policies to extend working lives often do not take into account potentially important health inequalities arising from differences in occupational exposures. Little is known about which occupational exposures are associated with these inequalities. This study aims to examine differences in life expectancy without and with disability by occupational...

Die Beziehungen zwischen Gesundheit und Verrentung sind sehr komplex. Einerseits ist Gesundheit eine wesentliche Determinante des Renteneintrittszeitpunkts (van den Berg, Elders & Burdorf 2010; Rice et al. 2010), andererseits sind sowohl frühere Arbeitsbedingungen wie auch der Übergangsprozess selbst wichtige Einflussfaktoren (im Sinne von „Fernwir...

Objectives: To study associations between perceived neighborhood resources and time spent by older adults in active travel. Methods: Respondents in six European countries, aged 65-85 years, reported on the perceived presence of neighborhood resources (parks, places to sit, public transportation, and facilities) with response options "a lot," "so...

The aim of this study was to identify macro-level determinants of early work exit and investigate whether the effects of these determinants differ across educational groups. We used data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) (2011–2013) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) (2010/2011–2012/2013) as well as...

This study assessed change in self‐reported Big Five personality traits. We conducted a coordinated integrative data analysis using data from 16 longitudinal samples, comprising a total sample of over 60 000 participants. We coordinated models across multiple datasets and fit identical multi‐level growth models to assess and compare the extent of t...

Objectives Previous research has shown that poor physical and mental health are important risk factors for early work exit. We examined potential differences in this association in older workers (50+) across educational levels. Methods Coordinated analyses were carried out in longitudinal data sets from four European countries: the Netherlands (Lo...

The Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) is a prospective cohort study of older adults in the Netherlands, initially based on a nationally representative sample of people aged 55–84 years. The study has been ongoing since 1992, and focuses on the determinants, trajectories and consequences of physical, cognitive, emotional and social functioni...

Scientific understanding of the associations between socio-economic adversity and other domains such as health and psychosocial functioning may be improved by employing extensive, prospective life course data to model inter-individual heterogeneity in socio-economic trajectories. This study applied Latent Class Growth Analysis to derive a typology...

Background: Monitoring of trends in functioning of older adults provides indispensable information for health care policy. This study examined trends in multiple indicators of functioning among Dutch older adults across a period of 20 years. Methods: Data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam were used. We included 10 870 observations of 3...

Background: Educational inequalities in health have been widely reported. A low educational level is associated with more adverse working conditions. Working conditions, in turn, are associated with health and there is evidence that this association remains after work exit. Because many countries are raising the statutory retirement age, lower edu...

Age-related declines in multiple aspects of sex life are well documented, but we know little about historical change in key sexuality facets. We examine cohort differences in the perceived importance of sexuality and the evaluation of one’s sex life among middle-aged adults. We compare data from 55 to 64-year-olds in the Longitudinal Aging Study Am...

Poor health after retirement may have an important economic and societal impact and may be affected by macro-level factors. Our aim was to examine whether macro-level factors are associated with health and educational differences in health in recent retirees. We used data covering 18 European countries from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retireme...

Objective: To determine whether there is an association between osteoarthritis (OA) and incident social isolation using data from the European Project on OSteoArthritis (EPOSA) study. Design: Prospective, observational study with 12 to 18 months of follow-up. Setting: Community dwelling. Participants: Older people living in six European coun...

Research has indicated the need to consider the ageing process with technology adoption by older adults. This study examined psychological, health, social and demographic predictors with starting and stopping Internet use by older adults (2002–2012). Data were used from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam, and Cox regression analyses were done t...

Objective: Handgrip strength, an indicator of overall muscle strength, has been found to be associated with slower rate of cognitive decline and decreased risk for cognitive impairment and dementia. However, evaluating the replicability of associations between aging-related changes in physical and cognitive functioning is challenging due to differ...

Women’s physical functioning declines with age and the rate of decline increases with age, but substantial disparities exist in trajectories over time. To inform development of interventions to optimise physical functioning across the adult life span, the aim is to explore which lifestyle and socio-economic position (SEP) factors contribute to disp...

Background The Australian/Canadian hand Osteoarthritis Index (AUSCAN) and the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities knee and hip Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) are the most commonly used clinical tools to manage and monitor osteoarthritis (OA). Few studies have as yet reported longitudinal changes in the AUSCAN index regarding the hand. While the...

Background Decreased physical function is known to raise mortality risk. Little is known about how different physical function measures compare in predicting mortality risk in older men and women. The objective of this study was to compare four, objective and self-reported, physical function measures in predicting 15-year mortality risk in older me...

Background There are substantial socioeconomic inequalities in functional limitations in old age. Resilience may offer new insights into these inequalities by identifying constellations of factors that protect some individuals from developing functional limitations despite socioeconomic adversity. Methods Data from 1973 participants in the Medical...

Background Substantial research is dedicated to understanding the aging-related dynamics among individual differences in level, change, and variation across physical and cognitive abilities. Evaluating replicability and synthesizing these findings has been limited by differences in measurements and samples, and by study design and statistical analy...

Objectives: Older immigrants are affected by an accumulation of adversities related to migration and aging. This study investigates resilience in older immigrants by examining the resources they use to deal with these adversities in the course of their lives. Methods: Data from 23 life-story interviews with Turkish and Moroccan immigrants aged 6...

Aims. Studying birth-cohort differences in depression incidence and their explanatory factors may provide insight into the aetiology of depression and could help to optimise prevention strategies to reduce the worldwide burden of depression. Methods. Data were used from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam, a nationally representative study amo...

Background This study examines the association of both pain severity and within-person pain variability with physical activity (PA) in older adults with osteoarthritis (OA). Methods Data from the European Project on OSteoArthritis were used. At baseline, clinical classification criteria of the American College of Rheumatology were used to diagnose...

Deeg and colleagues observe that since 2007 healthy life expectancy has not increased across European countries. Combined with the observation that total life expectancy has shown increases, this means that older people on average will spend more years in poor health. People in poorer health generally participate less in social activities than thos...

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is associated with substantial health impact that may already become apparent in early disease. This study aims to examine the features of subjects with COPD in a Dutch population-based sample and compare their physical status, mental status, and social status to non-COPD subjects. This study made use of...

Background. In several OECD countries the percentage of people over 80 in LTC institutions has been declining for more than a decade, despite population ageing. The standard model to explain healthcare utilization, the Andersen model, cannot explain this trend. We extend the Andersen model by including proxies for the relative attractiveness of co...

Objectives: Little is known about sex differences in healthy life expectancy among the oldest old, the fastest growing segment of the older population. This study examines sex differences in total, healthy and unhealthy life expectancy among nonagenarians. Methods: Longitudinal data of 884 older adults aged 90 and over participating in the Vital...

Objectives: To examine 23-year trends in both physically and cognitively healthy life expectancy from age 65 years in the Netherlands. Methods: We used 8 waves between 1993 and 2016 from the nationally representative Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (12 948 observations). We calculated physically and cognitively healthy life expectancies by us...

Adding to recent evidence of terminal decline in affective well-being, this study examined the role of physical health in accounting for time-to-death-related changes in positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). We distinguished effects of preterminal health levels predicting levels (“preserved differentiation”) and terminal changes (“differen...

Life span psychological and life course sociological perspectives have long acknowledged the role of historical and sociocultural contexts for individuals’ functioning and development. Secular increases favoring older adults in later born cohorts are widely documented for fluid cognitive performance and well-being. However, less is known about secu...

Purpose In the Netherlands, a great variety of objectively measured geo-data is available, but these data are scattered and measured at varying spatial and temporal scales. The centralisation of these geo-data and the linkage of these data to individual-level data from longitudinal cohort studies enable large-scale epidemiological research on the i...

Objective: The aim of this article is to study the associations between healthy lifestyle in old age and decline in physical, psychological, cognitive, and social functioning. Method: A population-based sample of 3,107 Dutch men and women aged 55 and 85 years (1992/1993; Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam) was used with five 3-yeary follow-up ex...

Background: to better understand the development of frailty with ageing requires longitudinal studies over an extended time period. Objective: to investigate changes in the degree of frailty during later life, and the extent to which changes are determined by socio-demographic characteristics. Methods: six measurement waves of 1,659 Dutch olde...

Objective: To study time trends in the incidence of persistent cognitive decline (PCD), and whether an increase or decrease is explained by changes in well-known risk factors of dementia. Method: Data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam over a period of 20 years were used. Subsamples of 65-88 year-olds were selected at 7 waves, with numb...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to determine which demographic, health-related, mood, personality, or social factors predict discrepancies between older adults' functional speech-in-noise test result and their self-reported hearing problems. Method Data of 1,061 respondents from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam were used (ages ranged fr...

Pain is a key symptom of Osteoarthritis (OA) and has been linked to poor mental health. Pain fluctuates over time within individuals, but a paucity of studies have considered day-to-day fluctuations of joint pain in relation to affective symptoms in older persons with OA. This study investigated the relationship of both pain severity and within-per...

Wereldwijd neemt het aantal mensen die 60 jaar en ouder zijn toe. Daarnaast neemt ook de gemiddelde levensverwachting toe. Echter, het aantal gezonde levensjaren neemt niet met dezelfde snelheid toe. Dit is mogelijk te verklaren door een ongezondere leefstijl van huidige generaties.

Background and objectives: This qualitative study applied a resilience perspective to socioeconomic inequalities in the functioning of older adults. We aimed to gain insight into how some older adults managed to age successfully despite having a low socioeconomic position (SEP) throughout their lives. Research design and methods: Semistructured...

Background: Late-life depression is associated with premature mortality, however, little is known whether excess mortality rates of depression have changed over time. This study aims to identify and explain secular trends in excess mortality of major depressive disorder (MDD) and subthreshold depression (SUBD). Methods: Cohort-sequential-longitu...

Objectives: Despite a large body of sociological and psychological literature suggesting that religious activities may mitigate the effects of stress, few studies have investigated the beneficial effects of religious activities among immigrants. Immigrants in particular may stand to benefit from these activities because they often report a religiou...

This study assessed change in the Big Five personality traits. We conducted a coordinated integrative data analysis (IDA) using data from 14 studies including 47,190 respondents to examine trajectories of change in the traits of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Coordinating models across multiple study site...

This study aimed to determine the predictors of entering a hearing aid evaluation period (HAEP) using a prospective design drawing on the health belief model and the transtheoretical model. In total, 377 older persons who presented with hearing problems to an ENT-specialist (n = 110) or a hearing aid dispenser (n = 267) filled in a baseline questio...

Background Studying secular trends in the exposure to risk and protective factors of depression and whether these trends are associated with secular trends in the prevalence of depression is important to estimate future healthcare demands and to identify targets for prevention. Methods Three birth cohorts of 55–64-year olds from the population-bas...

Meestal denkt men bij gezond ouder worden aan de lichamelijke gezondheid, maar de cognitieve gezondheid is minstens zo belangrijk. Veel ouderen merken dat ze wat trager in denken worden, hebben geheugenklachten en merken dat het soms wat meer tijd kost voor ze het overzicht over complexe situaties hebben. Valt er iets aan te doen om dat te voorkome...