Davina McCall has revealed she experienced symptoms of advanced Alzheimer's after undergoing surgery to remove a benign brain tumour in November 2024. The TV presenter described 2025 as the "hardest year" for herself and her husband, celebrity hairstylist Michael Douglas, while appearing on the Mad, Sad and Bad podcast with host Paloma Faith.
Memory loss after the operation
"After I'd had my brain tumour taken out, I had advanced Alzheimer's, so I couldn't remember anything," Davina, 58, explained. "When I came out of the operation, I didn't know I'd had an operation. The staff came in every day, and they'd go, 'What's my name?' and I'd go, 'I don't know'.
"Michael would come and visit for two hours, and he'd go to the loo and come back, and I'd go, 'Oh my God, you're here,' and I didn't know he'd been there. I couldn't watch a movie for six months because I couldn't remember what had happened in the movie 15 minutes before. A book I couldn't remember the page before."
Music as "mind physio"
Opening up about her recovery, Davina credited music with healing her. "I did singing lessons. Music. That was my mind physio. Yeah, music was what healed me. And last October was the first time I woke up, and I went, 'Oh my god, I remember what I did yesterday."
Davina, who confirmed she had a colloid cyst on Instagram, has spoken openly about her health journey. "I felt like this thing had taken control of me and I was so angry about that," she told Steven Bartlett on her Begin Again podcast. "I couldn't let it go. I was like, 'How dare you control my daily life like this and make me feel every day like I'm in danger?'"
Diagnosis and treatment
Davina was diagnosed with a non-cancerous brain tumour after undergoing a routine health check in 2024. "A few months ago, I did a menopause talk for a company, and they offered me a health scan in return, which I thought I was going to ace," she said in a video shared on Instagram. "But it turned out I had a benign brain tumour called a colloid cyst, which is very rare - three in a million."
Davina added that she would be undergoing a craniotomy, which involves the temporary removal of parts of the skull to take out the tumour. She was subsequently treated by neurosurgeon Kevin O'Neill, whom she now considers a dear friend. "We're going to be friends for the rest of our lives," Davina told Kevin in an interview with The Times. "We are going to go out to dinner with our partners! We are going to do it."
