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Richard Hammond is scared of dementia after horror Top Gear crash-Alistair McGeorge-Entertainment – Metro

The Grand Tour star reflects on his health worries.

Richard Hammond is scared of dementia after horror Top Gear crash-Alistair McGeorge-Entertainment – Metro

Richard Hammond has opened up on his health concerns (Picture: Jeff Spicer/WireImage)

Richard Hammond has admitted he’s afraid of being diagnosed with onset dementia following his horror 320mph car crash in 2006.

The former Top Gear host was filming a stunt for the BBC show at York’s Elvington airfield when one of the tyres blew on the Vampire jet car and caused the vehicle to spin out of control, leaving Richard in a coma and suffering a frontal lobe brain injury.

Appearing on the Diary Of A CEO podcast, he said: ‘I worry about my memory because it’s not brilliant. I can still read a script and deliver it but my long-term memory is not brilliant.

‘I have to write things down and work hard to remember them sometimes.  It might be the age, it might be the onset of something else, I worry about that. I do, I do. I should probably have a look and find out, because I do.’

The podcast’s host Steven Bartlett asked the 53-year-old star if he was ‘scared of finding out’, and he admitted he is.

‘I am because it was a bleed on the front. It could mean there is an increased risk. I need to find out. I’ve been too scared to do it. I need to do it,’ he confessed.

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‘Weirdly on the way here, I had to stop off for a medical for a production. They ask “Have you been involved in any accidents?” I’m like “Woooah! Can I have another piece of paper please?”

‘I need to book myself in for one of those mid-life MOTs and check everything. I wanted to ask them to check there is nothing going awry up here [pointing to his head]. But I chickened out. Didn’t.

‘That means I probably need an MRI scan but at 53, your memory does start to get a bit… they call it lost key syndrome. I am quite forgetful, generally thinking about something else, the next thing and therefore  I do drop the ball, I forget stuff a lot. That’s just me. That’s who I am.’

The crash saw him come ‘remarkably close to death’ and left him suffering from depression in the wake of the accident, while he has ‘no recollection’ of the incident due to the frontal lobe bleed. 

‘I have no recollection because there was the frontal lobe bleed. I was just decelerating upside down, using my head as a brake, which isn’t good for you,’ he said.

Richard has admitted he has health fears after the 2006 crash (Picture: BBC)

The former Top Gear star was in a coma after the accident (Picture: BBC)

‘Mindy. [his wife], was told by the doctors that a frontal brain lobe injury would possibly lead to me having a greater propensity for obsessive compulsion and depression and paranoia.

‘Mindy was like, “You didn’t meet him before  the crash, did you?” which is quite funny to be fair. I think I did suffer a bit, I suffered all of those things to a degree. Some of them were really weird moments and I still get an echo of it.’

Six years ago, Richard was airlifted to hospital in Switzerland after a second crash, this time during filming for Amazon’s The Grand Tour.

‘It’s not surprising that we don’t want to face it. I do practice a bit of mindfulness and as you get older, talking about it makes it easier. You don’t have to imagine a world without you in it because you wont be in it,’ he candidly explained. ‘I had very bad post traumatic amnesia for weeks.

‘Like a one-minute memory. Mindy my wife said I was the nicest I had ever been. Lovely apparently. I was perfectly happy reading the same newspaper every single day several times a day until Mindy took it away because she was sick of seeing me read it. 

‘If someone is in that confused state for whatever reason, if they are happy, they are happy.  All you’ve got to do is cope to support them in that. It doesn’t matter if they cant remember who you are. And I was. ‘

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