Ulrika Jonsson thought her menopause symptoms were actually signs of dementia.
The 51-year-old TV presenter was worried when she became confused, forgot words and had problems with her short-term memory and she says her then-husband Brian Monet’s lack of empathy led to the breakdown of their marriage.
She told the Daily Mail: "By the time I confided in my pal about my dementia fears, I was also suffering with crippling anxiety, another blow to my self-confidence.
"I kept being floored by a sense of doom that I couldn’t snap myself out of. I’d have dark thoughts about terrible things happening to my children; waking up with a knot in my stomach but no sense of what could be making me feel so worried.
"I didn’t tell the kids how I was feeling because I didn’t want to scare them. I was still with my husband Brian at the time — we’re now divorcing — and he didn’t even try to empathise with what I was going through.
"In fact, he didn’t seem interested at all. It’s so important to share things in a relationship, yet I was doing 99 per cent of the talking. I felt incredibly alone.
"While I don’t want to go into why my marriage broke down, I do believe the hurt and disappointment I felt at that time added to a sense of loneliness in my relationship."
After speaking to her mother and some friends, Ulrika decided to see a doctor and says it took about 12 months for her to start feeling like herself again
She said: "It turned out that I was particularly low in progesterone — the ‘calming’ hormone — along with the obvious one, oestrogen, which was causing my memory problems.
"That’s because falling levels of oestrogen can slow down the speed at which the brain’s neuro-transmitters work and cause problems in the hippocampus region of the brain, which is where memory processing takes place.
"So I was prescribed testosterone, DHEA, progesterone, oestrogen, and pregnenolone — all applied as creams. It took a good 12 months to get the balance spot-on, but I soon felt much better."
Ulrika Jonsson’s dementia fears
