Martin Frizell says Fiona Phillips is now slowly “slipping away” from him, four years after the diagnosis that changed their family life and turned him into her full-time carer. In February 2026, he said, “It’s wretched; not just for her but for the family as well.”
The update is drawing attention because Phillips, now 65, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at 61 after symptoms that began in late 2021. What first looked like menopause and the aftershocks of the COVID lockdowns turned out, after clinical testing in early 2022, to be neurological disease.
Frizell stepped down from his ITV role on This Morning in December 2024 to care for Phillips at home in South London, where the couple lives with their sons Nathaniel and Mackenzie, now 26 and 23. The family’s situation is not a short-term interruption but a long decline, with one parent in care mode and the other losing ground to an illness that cannot be reversed.
That is what gives Phillips’ story its weight. Her memoir, Remember When: My Life with Alzheimer, was published in 2025, but a book could only describe the disease, not slow it. Frizell’s latest comments make clear that the illness is progressing in public view, even if the family has not laid out every medical detail of what that means day to day.
There is also a harder layer beneath the headline. Both of Phillips’ parents died of Alzheimer’s in their 50s and 60s, making the diagnosis feel, to the family, less like a surprise than a cruel repetition. Early-onset Alzheimer’s makes up nearly 10 percent of diagnoses worldwide when the total number of cases is measured by the share of people living with dementia who are diagnosed before age 65, and Phillips’ case sits squarely in that smaller but devastating group.
Frizell’s account leaves one central gap: how fast is Phillips declining now, beyond the phrase he chose to describe it? What is already clear is that the family has moved from trying to explain strange symptoms to living with the disease itself, and the burden has settled on Frizell and their two adult sons as much as on Phillips.
