Symptoms can develop between the ages of 30 and 65

There are about 70,000 people in the UK living with early-onset dementia – including Birds of a Feather actress Pauline Quirke.

According to Prof Nick Fox, group leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute at UCL, dementia is the most ‘devastating health condition of our age’.

Early-onset dementia is where people are diagnosed before 65, with symptoms developing between the ages of 30 and 65.

Prof Fox said: “You may lose the ability to work, the ability to drive.

“You may then lose friends who don’t quite know how to interact with you and ultimately the saddest loss of connection is not just with yourself but with loved ones because you no longer know them.”

While some risk factors have reduced, Prof Fox said others were on the rise.

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He said: “We know the key risk factors and some of them mean your risk of dementia at all ages has got slightly less for that particular age because of better blood pressure control that happened 20, 30 years ago.

“So we’ve got these factors we’re getting better at treating but other risk factors are increasing, like obesity and diabetes.”

But there are things you can do to try to reduce your risk of being diagnosed with early-onset dementia, Mirror reports.

Not smoking and eating well to lower your risk of getting diabetes or high cholesterol can help.

You should also try to stay ‘mentally and physically active’, Prof Fox said.

He said: “Most of the things that are good for your heart are also good for your brain.

“One of the drops we think that happened over the past 20 years in the prevalence of developing dementia in their 70s and 80s was because they got better blood pressure treatment in middle age.

“Alongside blood pressure are other things that we often call vascular risk factors – smoking, diabetes, high cholesterol – all the things that can clog up the arteries to your heart can clog up your brain.

“Those are really important things. There are other things that are not good for your brain like repeated head injury.

“As we’ve seen with lots of professional boxers, there’s damage. Then there’s just generally staying mentally and physically active.”