Portrait of Professor Dag Årsland

Dag Årsland gained his degree in medicine in 1988 from the University of Oslo. At the same time as he was working as a clinician at Stavanger University Hospital he started to conduct research, gaining his PhD in 1996 with a thesis on language disorders among patients with Alzheimer's disease. In 1998 he became a specialist in psychiatry.

From 2000 to 2002 he was a senior lecturer in geriatric psychiatry at the University of Bergen. He then became an adjunct professor, then professor of geriatric medicine at Bergen from 2006-2009. Between 2007 and 2009 he was a visiting professor at King's College in London, where he has held an honorary professorship since 2009. In 2009 Dag Årsland became a professor of geriatric psychiatry at the University of Oslo. He is also a director of research at the University of Stavanger's Centre for Age-Related Medicine.

Dag Årsland was, for several years, director of the Norwegian Neuropsychiatric Association. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, most recently in 2011 when he was awarded the Western Norway Regional Health Authority's Research Prize.

Dag Årsland was appointed professor of clinical dementia research at Karolinska Institutet in 2011.

Research area

Many elderly people are affected by dementia or depression, sometimes even both. One problem is to set the correct diagnosis in cases where symptoms are often similar.

Within clinical dementia research, different patient groups are studied with the goal of identifying new biomarkers and brain activity that can be linked to depression, dementia and Parkinson's. This is done by drawing blood and cerebral spinal fluids in addition to advanced imaging techniques.

Dag Årsland's research is both interdisciplinary and translational with collaboration between various specialists in clinics and laboratories.

More information

Research group