As with heart disease and other illnesses, lifestyle factors are key to preventing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, Swedish researchers said on Thursday.

Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have identified risk predictors in middle age that could help to identify people more likely to suffer dementia in later life.

They include education, raised blood pressure, High cholesterol levels, obesity and lack of exercise, which are similar to risk factors for heart disease and strokes.

“The key point for all these factors is lifestyle changes,” Miia Kivipelto, the lead researcher, said in an interview.

“The risk factors are quite the same for heart disease. It is positive news because it opens up totally new avenues for intervention and prevention of dementia,” she added.

There is no cure for dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, the leading cause of dementia in the elderly, so any means of primary prevention is important.

An estimated 12 million people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and the numbers are expected to rise as the population ages.

Kivipelto and her team analysed data from a study of 1,409 people who were assessed for signs of dementia in midlife - about 50 years old - and 20 years later. They studied several factors to develop their risk predictor.

The four percent of people in the study who developed dementia had the highest risk score for the six risk predictors 20 years earlier, according to the study published in The Lancet medical journal.

“It is a practical tool to show how much these risk factors linked to dementia,” Kivipelto explained.

“It is never too early to prevent dementia and there is quite a lot we can do ourselves to save our brains, not only our hearts, because there are the same risk factors for both diseases,” she added.

In an earlier study, scientists from the National University of Singapore discovered that elderly people who ate curry occasionally, less than once a month, scored better on a standard tests to measure cognitive function.

Tze-Pin Ng and a team of researchers, who reported their results in the American Journal of Epidemiology, said reports have suggested that curcumin, a constituent of turmeric, inhibits the build-up of plaques in the brain which is linked to Alzheimer’s disease.