Dean Windass has shared his heartbreaking concern for his footballer sons after he was diagnosed with dementia.
The former Premier League star, 56, was diagnosed with stage two dementia last January after being urged to have tests by fellow footballer John Stiles, whose father, England World Cup winner Nobby Stiles, died from the disorder.
Appearing on Good Morning Britain with his fiancée Kerry Kehoe on Wednesday, he revealed he regretted finding out that he had the neurological condition as it left him “scared” and “overthinking” tasks in his daily life.
The former Hull City and Bradford player added that he’s now worried for the health of his sons, Josh, 31, and Jordan, 25, who both play football.
"The reason obviously that I didn’t come out and speak about it a year and a half ago was that my eldest son is a professional footballer and my youngest son was a professional footballer but plays amateur football now," he told hosts Ed Balls and Ranvir Singh.
"I didn’t want my mum to worry, I didn’t want my kids to worry, I didn’t want her [Kerry’s] family to worry.”
Windass went on: “It’s not just football matches, it’s training everyday, the repetition of heading balls everyday - I did it for 20 years. I don’t know if Josh does head it everyday.
“He’s not a massive header of the ball anyway really but I said to him ‘try not to head the ball’ but you have to in a game, of course you have. He scored a goal at Wembley by heading the ball. You’ve got to head it, but can you minimise it in training?”
Discussing the initial diagnosis, he added: "John [Stiles] asked me about a year and half ago [to get a scan] and I declined.
“I said ‘No, I’m not interested really to find out’, and he was expressing about the football families and how a lot of ex footballers have passed away [from dementia].
“He said, ‘Look it might help a lot of people’, so I was sort of a guinea pig to go into this scan machine.
“There’s a lot of footballers that won’t do it because they don’t want to know the outcome. I wish I wouldn’t have gone in now, but it’s happened.”
Balls asked: "You wish you hadn’t done the scan?” to which Windass said: “Yeah, because then I wouldn’t have known would I? It would be better not to know.”
He shared: "They said this is the diagnosis, it’s very mild. You have nothing to worry about at this stage. It could be five to ten years that it could develop to bigger stages, so it wasn’t the news that I wanted. I was scared Ed, I was scared, of course I was.
“I do forget a lot of things of course, but Kerry runs everything for me. I'm 56 now, so of course I forget names and forget things, but I don’t know if I’m over thinking subconsciously. Kerry will ask me everyday ‘Do you know what you’re doing this week?’”
Kehoe admitted she had "never noticed" any symptoms before her partner’s scan and said they "buried our heads in the sand" after the diagnosis.
"We don’t really speak about it to each other. I speak to my friends and Dean obviously speaks to his, but I’ve never actually sat down and said to him ‘how do you feel about it?’” she admitted.
