Maintaining healthy blood pressure through middle-age can have an impact on helping to stave off dementia in later life.

A new study, carried out by the University of California, makes the link between blood pressure and memory skills for the first time.

Previous studies had linked lack of fitness and heart health to declining mental function and dementia around the age of 70 or 80.

But this new research revealed that young and middle aged adults with blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels higher than recommended levels performed worse in cognitive function tests.

Dr Kristine Yaffe, of the University of California, said: “We know these risk factors are important later in life but what is new is that they seem to be important for cognitive health even going from young to mid-adulthood. This is the first time anyone has shown this.”

The research followed over 300,000 young people, initially aged 18-30, for a period of 25 years.

At the 25-year mark, technicians gave each participant three tests meant to assess memory and learning, brain ageing and decision processing speed.

Higher blood pressure readings early in life were associated with poorer performance on all three mental function tests at year 25. The same was true of higher blood glucose levels and people who were diabetic did not perform as well on the tests as those without diabetes.

Those with higher cholesterol scored lower on the learning and memory test, but there was no difference in their performance on the brain ageing test or the processing speed test, according to the research which was published in Circulation.

Dr Yaffe added:

The differences are probably too small to be clinically significant, but the question is whether this is the beginning of something later.

Research a couple of years ago by the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France showed the importance of keeping the heart healthy in the battle to avoid dementia in later life.

The research concluded that eating well and taking regular exercise can play important roles in delaying the onset of memory problems.

Researchers went on to claim that people will need to be leading a much healthier lifestyle from a younger age in order to give themselves the best chance of delaying dementia.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, the research team said: “There is emerging consensus that what is good for our hearts is also good for our heads, making aggressive control of behavioural and cardiovascular risk factors as early as possible key targets for clinical practice and public health.”

At least 750,000 people in Britain suffer from dementia and more than half of them have Alzheimer’s disease. These figures are predicted to soar dramatically over the next thirty years as the world’s population becomes increasingly elderly.