After presenter Fiona Phillips revealed her Alzheimer’s diagnosis at just 61, we look at common symptoms – and whether you need to worry
“This disease has ravaged my family and now it has come for me,” Fiona Phillips said this week, revealing she has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at just 61. “My poor mum was crippled with it, then my dad, my grandparents, my uncle. It just keeps coming back for us.”
Phillips, a former host of ITV breakfast show GMTV, described how even after watching what her parents went through and worrying Alzheimer’s could be in her future too, she never imagined that she’d have to endure diagnosis so young. “It’s something I might have thought I’d get at 80,” she admitted. Finding out was a “total shock”. “I felt more angry than anything else because this disease has already impacted my life in so many ways.”
Brain fog, anxiety and confusion were Phillips’s main symptoms, leaving her “tearful” and a “shadow of [herself]”. She wrote in The Mirror how she had “cried a thousand rivers in the past few weeks and I’ve got nothing to be sad about. I’ve been fearing for my sanity and am scared to do things I’ve been doing with ease for years.”
Phillips’s husband, This Morning executive Martin Frizell, said they had assumed her symptoms were related to the menopause. They have two children in their 20s. “We got in touch with a menopause specialist who took her under their wing and put her on HRT, but while that improved some symptoms, the brain fog remained.”