Cardiovascular disease risk modification may be critical to preventing adults with focal epilepsy from developing dementia in later life, UK doctors report.

The advice follows study results suggesting patients with focal epilepsy and high cardiovascular risk were nearly 14 times more likely to be diagnosed with dementia than those without the syndrome.

In contrast, the likelihood of dementia diagnosis was about seven times higher in adults with a history of stroke and high cardiovascular risk burden, according to the University of Oxford–led team.

Their findings were based on a cross-sectional study of nearly 500,000 UK Biobank participants (mean age 58), including a subset of 42,000 individuals who also underwent brain MRI scans between 2014 and 2020.