Fiona Phillips’ husband Martin Frizell has shared an update on the TV presenter’s health following her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease, revealing that she’s “still very much with us”.
The 65-year-old broadcaster, who hosted GMTV for 15 years, shared in 2023 that she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s after suffering with symptoms of brain fog and anxiety.
Appearing on ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Tuesday, Frizell – who produced This Morning for a decade until last year – gave viewers an update on his wife’s condition.
“To this day, Fiona is still very much with us,” he said. “She still looks the same. She was the world’s most stubborn woman, and she’s still the world’s most stubborn woman, which is difficult when you try to give her medicine.”
While Phillips wrote about her experience with the disease in her memoir Remember When last year, Frizell said that she copes by refusing to speak about the illness.
“Her way of dealing with it, and everyone’s different, is that she doesn’t want to talk about the A-word, so we don’t,” he said.
“She will just believe she has chronic depression, which she does have, which is another symptom of it as well. [She’s] frightened, yes.”
When asked by host Susanna Reid whether Phillips – whose parents both suffered with Alzheimer’s – inherited the disease, Frizell said that it’s not genetic but she was “more predisposed to it”.
“She probably knew this was coming. It’s not an old person’s disease,” he said. “You can get it at any age, children can get it and she got it in her fifties.
“We did have a test and they said it’s not genetic but she’s more predisposed to it because both her parents had it. We never spoke about it. Maybe we should – maybe the lesson is that people should speak about these things. It’s a difficult discussion to have. What should we do if X, Y and Z happens?”
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Frizell urged the government to put more funding into Alzheimer’s research, saying: “Why are we not putting more money into Britain’s biggest killer?
“It seems to be that Alzheimer’s is the poor relation to all the other big diseases, something like cancer. The money isn’t there.”
Frizell and Phillips have been married since 1997 and live with their two sons, Nathaniel and Mackenzie, in south London.
Frizell was the long-standing boss at ITV’s This Morning, before stepping down in December 2024, saying that he was “expecting [his] family priorities to change” in 2026.
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