Begin Again with Davina McCall - How To Care For Someone With Dementia: Begin Again Moments

Episode Date: February 22, 2026

What does it really feel like to lose someone… while they’re still here? In this powerful Begin Again Moments, Jamie Theakston opens up about his father’s dementia, the quiet grief, the role reversal, and the heartbreak of watching a parent slowly change. He speaks candidly about the anxiety of caring for someone who wants to stay independent, and the complicated emotions that come with loving someone who is still physically present but gradually slipping away . Then psychologist Kimberley Wilson explains the science behind dementia and Alzheimer’s, including why women are at higher risk, the worrying rise in young-onset diagnoses, and the surprising lifestyle factors that could prevent up to 45% of cases. From hearing loss and social isolation to brain stimulation and stress, she shares what we can actually do to protect our brain health. This short episode features powerful clips from their full conversations, both available to watch or listen to now. If you’re caring for a parent, worried about your own risk, or navigating the complicated emotions of dementia, this conversation is for you. Watch the full episodes with Jamie Theakston and Kimberley Wilson now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Sure. Can I talk to you about that? I feel like this podcast is about begin again and lots of people that watch this might be going through a phase of their life where life changes quite a lot, I think, when you're an adult and you're beginning to look after your parents. Yeah. And it always seems to happen at a time in our lives. when there's a load of other stuff going on as well. We might have teenagers who are struggling or we might have illness or then parents. And, you know, having had like the golden years of 30s, 40s, you know, career and marriage and...

Yeah, little kids. Little kids. It's like the glory years. And then we hit a pretty hard time. Yeah. how to navigate that. And you were saying your mum, who sounded like she was a driving force in your family. Completely.

That you get a lot of your fire. Yeah, she was an extraordinary woman. And I know she was very proud of me. She was. She loved her grandchildren. And she loved being able to see them and find out what they've been doing. And it's a sort of, there is a, you're right, there is that. there's a very blissful time in our lives when our parents are still playing quite an active part in our lives.

Very useful when it comes to childcare. But also it's a sort of great support mechers knowing that they're still there. And there's also something wonderful about seeing that sort of, there is a sort of brief fleeting moment when a family as a whole, as a whole, grandparents, you, kids all together and everyone is young enough or old enough whichever side of the spectrum we're at to be able to appreciate that and it's a really blissful time um and then the kids get older and and bring all the fun that teenage years can bring and then the thing and then your parents die and that's like no one there's you're going to be that you're going to

away on. No one's really prepared us for that part of our lives. And so that can actually be a time of great upheaval, I think, for anyone to have to be able to get to grips with when your children don't need you in the same way that they used to. And that happens in a blink of an eye. And then as parents, we're struggling to, the parenting becomes very difficult then because your children can start thinking for themselves and making their own decisions.

and then you kind of have to adjust to that, go, well, how, where, when do I, where do I impose myself and where do I have to sit off and just allow them to get on with it? So whilst you're dealing with that, you know, dropping the clutch and changing gear on that, you've also got on the other side, your parents suddenly getting ill or dying. And so my mum dying wasn't a great shock because she'd been unwell for some time. And then my dad was left on his own. Were they close? Yeah, they were.

They did everything together. I mean, so hard to have that many years together. And then one of you'd go. Even though he knew she was ill, she'd lived with it for a long time. He's never been, you know, he's never been a very expressive, kind of emotional kind of guy. He's from a sort of different era, really. and seeing him have to sort of struggle on his own is really difficult. Did he have signs of dementia before she died?

Yeah, I think so. A lot of those signs that we hadn't really, some of them, it manifests itself in strange ways. Irrational jealousies, which you think, that's odd. Paranoia. Paranoia. Can I tell you a weird thing? I understand a bit about that because I woke up with no short-term memory and it's come back very, very slowly over three months.

And I struggled with all of those feelings when I was just out of hospital. And so, and they are akin to a sort of a short-term memory loss. It's like an Alzheimer's. Yeah, it was, I got paranoid. I got, like, insecure. I didn't trust people that I love and trust. It was horrible, but I could feel it coming back rather than losing it. It gave me a new, well, obviously, you know my dad died of Alzheimer's.

It gave me a new appreciation for what he'd been through and for what your dad is going through now. And what it really feels like, it's extraordinary. It's a particularly cruel disease. And being unaware that you are doing it or that it's weird. You don't realise that it is strange. You think that it's absolutely like a normal feeling to have, but you aren't remembering everything. Yeah.

But you don't realise it. Yeah, it's losing someone and yet there's someone, they're still in the same body is a very weird thing. Did you start grieving your dad the minute that started happening? Yeah, because I felt like I'd lost the person that I always knew. Yes. And I think it was very difficult for my mum in her, you know, with her being very ill, but also as he became increasingly unwell,

she found it very difficult to deal with. And it is difficult because all the things that you always used to do together you can't do anymore and you struggle to find points of reference that you can share and you miss the man who he once was so there is a sort of grieving process

that you know also you're going to have to go through again so in a way when you have a parent who suffers from dementia, you know you've got to do it, you grieve that person that you've lost and then you know you're going to have to go through it again when they eventually do die. It's a very difficult time because it's difficult when they're still, feel that they still want to be able to make the decisions that they think are in their best interest when you know

they're not. And knowing how to deal with that is tricky. What kind of a relationship did you have with your dad when you were growing up? What kind of a dad was he to you? I always had a lot of, I love my dad. He was, he wasn't, as I say, before, he wasn't necessarily the most emotionally mature person, I guess. But he came from a different time. Did I find it hard to show his feeling? very much so. Oh, God. But you knew how he felt. Yeah. But he'd never say, oh, I love you. He'd never hug me or the things that I do to my boys, which make them go, ugh, get off. Dad, stop being so embarrassing. But I was always very proud of him and what he did. And he was quite entrepreneurial. He'd set up his own business, work for himself. He was his own boss.

I'd also have had a lot of happy memories playing sport with him he was a keen sportsman so we'd play cricket together play golf together play football together and so they're the memories I have for him of particularly fond memories yeah but you know we don't we don't share we we struggle to be able to share those things anymore which is sad but

is he still living independently Yeah, he is. And that's a source of anxiety for me because you're always worried about, you know, is he going to be okay? Is he doing the right? Is he eating? Okay. Is he looking after himself? And he'd always said, you know, he never wants to go into any care or any into a home.

He said, I'm not going. I'm not ever doing that. And they become hard making those decisions for people. who aren't maybe capable of making them themselves. And he's on his own. In a house where we, you know, we had so many sort of happy times, all of us together. It's now just him.

Is he in the country? Yeah. So he's quite a long way away from you. Yeah. Which is a bit stressful, right? Yeah, it's difficult. So, yeah. And I do, you know, I feel for anyone who's got,

going through that themselves. It's tough. It is. And you know it's going to be a difficult journey. That's the whole thing. You know, it's not. Well, yeah. It's a book where you know the ending.

And it being able to, it's not like you can, it's difficult to have enjoyed the time that you do have left. This episode is brought to you by Tell Us Online Security. Oh, tag season is the worst. You mean, hack season? Sorry, what?

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women than men get dementia? Yes. So when it comes to something like Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia, because dementia is an umbrella term, women have twice the risk of men. So of every three dementia patients, two of them are women. Okay. So when I've been told about that, that more women than men get it, I've been told that it's because we live longer. Is that true? It's not true. It's not true. And it's not true. Sorry, I love you. I didn't mean. It's absolutely fine. What? It's not true for a few reasons. Yeah, right. So first of all, if that were the case, then we, if it's, we're simply about aging, we would expect longer lived populations to have higher rates of outside disease. And that's not what we see. So places like Japan, places like Greece, who have an older population, Italy, don't have like correlation with that kind of. with dementia. So for example, in the UK, dementia is our leading cause of death.

I can't, how long has that been? Is that new? Oh, for years and no, not new. And even during COVID where it was still dementia. I'm pretty sure. No, we don't know that. We can, we can check that and perfect. Um, no, because we think maybe cancer or heart disease or, you know, some secondary outcome of of a fall. No, it's Alzheimer's disease. So that's in the UK, but somewhere like Greece, an older woman is more likely to die from

a respiratory infection. So complications of a flu or pneumonia than she is from Alzheimer's, even though on average she will live longer. So it's not simply, what we can say from that is it's not simply about age. And then there's another interesting, very worrying

trend, which is young onset, of dementia. So there's early onset dementia, which we do think seems to be genetically linked. But young onset dementia, which is when you're being diagnosed at a younger age, tells us that it's not about age because dementia is typically an age-related condition. But if there's something going wrong, if we're getting diagnosed earlier, that means there's something going on with the health of our brains, that our brains are aging at an accelerated rate when our bodies aren't so much. So it's not.

simply about about age. And having seen my father go through Alzheimer's, the one thing that you want to do for as long as you possibly can is preserve brain health because watching somebody go through that, it's not something I would want to experience. It's horrible. And interesting, you said this terrible trend for younger people being diagnosed. When you're saying younger, how old do you mean? Because I think, wasn't it isn't dementia's kind of, 65 plus. Is the average age of diagnoses. But so it would you be considered younger if you were under 65?

Yes. Okay. And there's more of that happening now. It's growing. It's the number of people being diagnosed in their late 40s, 50s is increasing. Because I, you know, obviously when we were talking about older people, you were saying it's more genetic. And obviously my father had Alzheimer's, so it's something that I think about. But it, but it's not just. you're you're not just stuck with that.

There are things that we can do. So much that there was so much that we can do. The latest global commission on Alzheimer's disease says that 45% nearly half of global dementia cases can be prevented through changes in the environment and lifestyle. Wow. 45%. The 14 modifiable risk factors. Some of them aren't in our own individual hands, some of them about like air pollution and things like that. But other factors like you're taking care of things like hearing.

So if you're hearing, this is so interesting. Yeah, sorry, carry on. No, no. If your hearing starts to go, people who don't get a hearing aid are more likely to develop. up dementia than people who do get a hearing aid. Similarly with eyesight and we think that's because essentially like everything else in your body, your brain works on a use it or lose it principle, right? So if you don't keep working on your flexibility, your body says, we don't need to move in that range of motion anymore. Let's not bother maintaining it. We'll put the energy somewhere else.

And similarly with your brain, if your brain isn't being, if those neurons aren't being stimulated and used, then your brain says, well, we're not going to put the energy into maintaining them. We can use that energy elsewhere or just save it. And so when you lose your hearing, you're getting fewer inputs of stimulus from the environment. Your brain is being less challenged. And so it's kind of, it's like an empty warehouse.

You know, you kind of close the door and it starts to degrade. Because if you're not constantly using it and it's being constantly upkept, then you start to lose it. And the other potential, association between hearing loss and dementia is the loss of socialisation. Yes. Because we know that social connections are so important for our wellbeing. It helps to lower our stress. And I think I've seen people that find it hard to hear. Maybe in a big, busy restaurant or and you kind of see them kind of leaning in and then you just see them kind of check out a bit.

Oh, I'll just, I'll just watch this conversation happening. I can imagine. that. Really stressful. So that's interesting. So if somebody is thinking that they may be getting the beginning, I know as a person of like later midlife, like I'm getting on now, that loss of hearing is something that you don't want to admit to. It's a pride thing. And you don't want people to think that you're old. I mean, I know some people are really proud and don't mind getting old at all, but lots of people do. And it's about like not wanting to go to get checked, but wearing a hearing aid, does that make a difference? Yes. It does. Yes, because you're still going to give your brain that stimulation and you're still going to be able to stay connected with people and

socialising and engaging. And you're not, you're less likely to be isolated. And we know that loneliness is a big risk factor for dementia as well. Again, and we think that that's the stress of isolation because we're not meant to be isolated. We're kind of tribal network organisms. We need to be with other people in order to feel safe. And when we're alone, we feel vulnerable and that turns up our stress.