Birds of a Feather actress Pauline Quirke no longer recognises her own children due to her “devastating” early-onset dementia.

The 65-year-old mum-of-two was diagnosed with the condition in 2021, with her husband Steve Sheen saying in a heartbreaking statement she would be retiring from her hugely successful career. “Pauline just wants to spend time with her family, children and grandchildren,” he said.

Loose Women star Linda Robson, who famously teamed up with Pauline in Birds of a Feather, told the Sun at Monday night’s TV Choice Awards: “She doesn’t know who anybody is. She doesn’t know who I am or who her kids are. Dementia is terrible – I’d rather get cancer, because at least then you’ve got a chance.”

Statistics show that in 2022, more than 70,000 people in the UK were living with early-onset dementia, a general term for people who develop dementia under the age of 65, marking a 69 per cent increase from 2014. But leading expert Prof Nick Fox, Group Leader in the UK Dementia Research Institute at UCL, insisted: “There is nothing biological to suggest this is happening earlier”.

“So much of dementia at any age has previously gone under-recognised and underdiagnosed,” explained Prof Fox. “I think that’s something we are better at recognising, we are better at coming forward. Historically, if you are unusual in some way, if you’re young or have an unusual way of your dementia manifesting itself, it could be up to four years from the first symptoms.

“There are all sorts of stories of people being dismissed: ‘This is depression’, ‘This is the menopause’, all sorts of things. I’ve even known of people who are asked: ‘Are there marital difficulties?’ You start feeling like it’s your fault your partner has got cognitive problems.”

The expert called the condition “the most devastating health problem of our age”. “We’ve got so much better at treating other big killers like heart disease and cancer, we’ve made fantastic progress but we haven’t made that progress with dementia,” he said. “Dementia is now the commonest cause of the death in the UK, it’s a chronic illness of increasing disability and dependence over a decade and it affects far beyond the individual.

“It’s those people who care about and care for you, because people have very little support and often they become more and more isolated as they lose connection with the rest of the world. Someone with long onset, you may lose the ability to work, the ability to drive. You may then lose friends who don’t quite know how to interact with you and ultimately the saddest loss of connection is not just with yourself but with loved ones because you no longer know them.”

But there is hope for the future, with experimental treatments beginning to stop dementia in its tracks. And Prof Fox explained that some of the key risk factors for the disease had actually decreased. “We know the key risk factors and some of them mean your risk of dementia at all ages has got slightly less for that particular age because of better blood pressure control that happened 20, 30 years ago,” he said. “So we’ve got these factors that we’re getting better at treating but on the other hand other risk factors are increasing like obesity and diabetes.”

Between one in 15 and one in 20 people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, the brain disorder that gradually destroys memory and thinking skills, will be under the age of 65. “It’s not rare but it’s a minority,” said the expert. “Very rarely it will be younger than that, often when there’s a genetic link. I will see people in my clinic who have had an onset of their dementia, of their Alzheimer’s Disease at 35 or at 30.”

Pauline is not the only household name with the devastating condition – in 2023, TV presenter Fiona Phillips said she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the age of 62, with her mother, father and uncle also suffering from the disease. Prof Fox explained that when it came to a genetic link for the condition like former Daily Mirror columnist Fiona, he would expect to see an early-onset diagnosis in several family members.

“I’ve not been involved with Pauline (Quirke)’s care but it would be very different for me if I saw somebody in their 60s and their parents had lived to their 80s and there was nobody else in their family,” he said. “If I saw somebody in their 60s but they’d had a sister of similar age and their mum had got it when they were only 59, those are the things that make you worry, that there is a strong inherited component.”

When it comes to preventing dementia, Prof Fox has the following advice: “Most of the things that are good for your heart are also good for your brain. Alongside blood pressure are other things that we often call vascular risk factors – smoking, diabetes, high cholesterol – all the things that can clog up the arteries to your heart can clog up your brain. Then there’s just generally staying mentally and physically active.”

If you are worried about early onset dementia or the genetic link to the condition, visit Rare Dementia Support.

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