Hello, I'm Dr Louise Newsome. I'm a GP and menopause specialist, and I'm also the founder of the Newsome Health Menopause and wellbeing centre here in Stratford-Pon-Avon.

I'm also the founder of the free Balance app.

Each week on my podcast, join me and my special guests where we discuss all things perimenopause

and menopause. We talk about the latest research, bust myths on menopause symptoms and treatments,

and often share moving and always inspirational personal stories.

This podcast is brought to you by the Newsome Health Group,

which has clinics across the UK dedicated to providing individualised perimenopause and menopause care for all women.

Today on my podcast I'm going to introduce to you a very inspirational person called

Nicola who I met a few months ago. And she has met a neuron disease.

And she's also got hormonal deficiencies.

So she takes HRT for that.

And she's got a really interesting story.

And the more I think about hormones being biologically active throughout a body,

the more I'm really concerned about our brains and our nervous system,

because that's been ignored for so long. So I'm hoping in the next half hour we can really

tease out and unpick some of the reasons why our hormones are so important for all of our

nervous system and brains, but especially when you think about people that

have neurodegenerative disorders as well. So welcome, Nicola, to the podcast. Thanks very so much for

joining me. I'm in a different location today, so some of you might have seen I've got some of my

daughters' artwork behind me. So before we logged on, we were talking about art because you've gone from

being a sports person to now thinking about painting, haven't you? Yeah, that's true. I think MND is all

about adaptation and focusing what you can do. I can't write horses anymore or go for a run. So yeah,

...