Davina McCall feared she was developing Alzheimer’s disease after the menopause affected her memory.
The former Big Brother host, whose father, Andrew, has the illness, has revealed she went to her doctor after her symptoms, which included memory loss, began to affect her presenting schedule.
The 53-year-old’s doctor subsequently told her she is dealing with “cognitive overload”.
Appearing on Gabby Logan’s The Mid.Point podcast, she said: “I’m learning different things for everything in my brain sometimes, because when I went to my doctor and I said, ‘Look, please help me, I think I’ve got Alzheimer’s’, because obviously my dad’s got Alzheimer’s, and I was like, ‘I’m always paranoid - I know I haven’t really got it but am I OK?’ to her.
“She said, ‘It’s called cognitive overload’. And at our stage in life often our kids are all older. We thought it was going to get easier. It does not.”
The Masked Singer star first developed symptoms of the menopause when she was 44, and opened up on how hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has helped her.
She added: “I’m on HRT so I have absolutely no excuse to be going doolally but I’m still going doolally on the HRT.
“I am less angry. I don’t get night sweats. I don’t get hot flushes. These are the things that have gone. My joints feel, my bones feel lubricated and strong, but my memory... and like you Gabby, I work, I’ve got kids, I have a partner.
“Life is very busy and chaotic and you have to know a lot of stuff in your business about sort of everything. And I do lots of different jobs. So I have a hundred different hats on.
“I could be going from Long Lost Family one day, to The Masked Singer the next, to a Garnier job, to something else.”
The Mid.Point Podcast with Gabby Logan is available to stream now.