A three-year follow-up of 273 participants (mean age 60 years) of the Austrian Stroke Prevention Study provides the first information on the rate, clinical predictors, and cognitive consequences of MRI white-matter lesions in elderly individuals without neuropsychiatric disease. Lesion progression was found in 17.9% of individuals over a time period of 3 years. Diastolic blood pressure and early confluent or confluent white-matter hyperintensities at baseline were the only significant predictors of white-matter hyperintensity progression. Lesion progression had no influence on the course of neuropsychologic test performance over the observational period, but the statistical power of this analysis was low.