Fiona Phillips has shared a heartbreaking health update after revealing she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The TV presenter, 62, is currently in a trial for a drug called miride juice, which it is hoped could slow or even reverse the disease. It is not known whether she will receive the drug or a placebo as part of the trial.
Speak with The mirrorFiona shared how she has experienced minor short-term memory deficits, such as forgetting what she said during a conversation.
She said, ‘Oh, it’s terrible, but I keep having moments where I think, ‘What’s the word?’ It doesn’t happen all the time… just occasionally. And that’s just not me at all.
‘Normally I can talk until next Christmas. It’s just weird when it happens because I think, “Why is my mouth frozen and still thinking about the sentence?” It’s really weird.”
Candid: Fiona Phillips has shared a heartbreaking health update after revealing she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
Doctors at University College Hospital in London are still carrying out cognitive tests on Fiona to see if the trial drugs she is taking can stabilize – or reverse – her symptoms.
Neither Fiona nor her doctors know whether she is taking the real drug or a placebo as part of the trial.
The journalist was full of praise for her husband Martin Frizell – editor of ITV’s This Morning – describing him as ‘amazing’.
The star, who feels she is currently in a ‘malaise’, told how she has lost all interest in cooking and eating and Martin now does all the cooking.
Fiona said she has struggled with anxiety since her diagnosis and doesn’t go out as often as she used to.
She is still nervous about people knowing she has Alzheimer’s disease and sometimes forgets that she made her diagnosis public in July 2023.
Like many people with Alzheimer’s, Fiona has been prescribed antidepressants.
Despite the diagnosis, Fiona insisted she was getting on with life and still ‘doing fun things’.
In July, Fiona told the Mirror she had received news of the devastating disease dementiawhich killed both her parents about a year ago after suffering from months of brain fog and anxiety.
The couple explained how Mrs Phillips initially saw the onset of severe anxiety, which she believed was linked to menopause.
But after symptoms such as brain fog persisted despite taking HRT, she pursued further testing, which ultimately resulted in a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
The former breakfast TV presenter insisted she is ‘still here’, adding: ‘This disease has ravaged my family and now it has come for me. And all over the country there are people of all different ages whose lives are being affected by it – it’s heartbreaking.
“I just hope I can help find a cure that can make things better for others in the future.”
“It’s something I thought I would get when I was 80,” she said. ‘But I was only 61 years old.
‘I felt angrier than anything because this disease has already affected my life in so many ways; it crippled my poor mother, then my father, my grandparents, my uncle. It keeps coming back to us.”
Her father Neville died in February 2012, while her mother Amy died from the disease in May 2006.
Ms Phillips has regularly spoken out about the disease and has campaigned for Alzheimer’s Research UK.
She told The Mirror: ‘I need to create an action plan that can be used if I ‘disappear’… Of course I’m afraid of inheriting the disease because of my family history, and sometimes I wake up at night with a feeling of fear and worry . about the.
‘My parents were relatively young when they got it; My mother was in her early fifties, although at the time we only attributed that to her eccentric nature.’
Ms Phillips began her journalism career as a reporter for local radio stations such as Radio Mercury un Sussex and County Sound in Surrey.
Her big break came when she moved to GMTV as an entertainment correspondent in 1993, before being promoted to their LA correspondent in December of the same year.
She then fronted the breakfast show from 1997 to 2008, serving as the main anchor every Monday to Wednesday.
Ms Phillips announced in 2008 that she was leaving the show for family reasons and presented her last show in December.
This followed the death of her mother, and came after her father was also diagnosed with the disease.