Eighteen Months of Losing Words in Board Meetings. One Conversation With a Woman I Barely Knew. And the Research That Explained Both.

The first time it happened, I dismissed it.

I was presenting to the board. Twenty-three years in professional services, hundreds of presentations, a room I knew as well as my own kitchen. I was mid-sentence and the word was gone. Not recalled slowly. Not slipped slightly out of reach. Gone. I stood there for what felt like a full minute — probably four seconds — while eleven people waited for me to finish.

I told myself I was tired. I had been tired for months. I told myself it was Q4 pressure, the demands of the role, the kind of thing that clears when the project ends. I told myself a lot of things.

It happened again the following week. And the week after that.

I started writing things down that I had never had to write before.

I am not someone who doesn't notice things. Noticing things is, in fact, the primary function of my role. I track projects, people, deadlines, risks, the undercurrents in rooms where nothing is being said directly. I had always done this automatically. That autumn, I started writing things down that I had never had to write before. Meeting outcomes. Names of people I had worked alongside for years. The thread of a conversation I needed to pick up in an hour.

I was 48 years old and I was making notes about how to do things I had done fluently for two decades.

The most exhausting part was not the forgetting. It was the performing. Because I looked fine. I was still producing. Still billing the same. Still turning up and delivering. Internally I was running on a reserve I could feel getting thinner every week. My business partner noticed something was off. My husband noticed. He told me carefully one evening that I had stopped laughing at things. I hadn't noticed until he said it. That was the moment that stayed with me: I had become someone who didn't laugh at things, and I hadn't known.

I went to my GP. She administered cognitive assessment tests. She said nothing was wrong. She said I seemed stressed. I told her I had been stressed for twenty-five years and this was not stress. She offered antidepressants. I declined and went home and searched early-onset Alzheimer's at 2am. Alone.

What followed was weeks of forum threads, clinical papers, and a private appointment with a neurologist who told me my brain scan was clear. No answers. Just the ongoing, reliable absence of words in the situations where I had always had them.

I tried everything. Cut caffeine. Took magnesium glycinate at night, ashwagandha in the morning. Tried progesterone cream when a forum thread suggested it might help. Eventually found a private women's health clinic willing to try me on low-dose HRT. The HRT helped with hot flushes I hadn't fully named. It steadied something in my mood. But I was still losing words. Still waking at 3am to lie there until 5 or 6, thinking about nothing particular with complete alertness. Still running the simulation of myself that passes for competence while the real reserves ran thin.

Eighteen months passed like this.

The answer came from a conversation I almost didn't have.

A woman I knew through a business network — someone I had spoken to perhaps three times over two years — mentioned in passing that she had been using a NAD+ injection protocol and that cognitive clarity had been the first thing to change. I almost let it go. I had been let down by enough things that I had developed a reflex against hoping. But she was specific in a way that rang true. She didn't say she had more energy. She said the word-finding had come back. She said it happened in the third or fourth week and she had not lost a word mid-sentence in public since.

I went home and looked into it properly.

NAD+ — nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide — is a molecule present in every cell in your body. It is involved in more than 500 enzymatic processes. It is what your cells use to produce energy, repair DNA, and maintain the biological machinery that keeps your brain functioning the way it is supposed to. What most people don't know — what I hadn't known — is that NAD+ levels decline significantly after forty. In some research, by 50% or more between the ages of 40 and 60.

The cognitive changes that had been dismantling my competence for eighteen months were not random. They were not stress and they were not the beginning of an irreversible decline. They had a cellular mechanism. NAD+ is involved in the processes that keep working memory functional, that support the speed of information retrieval, that sustain the kind of fast-pattern processing that professional roles depend on. When those levels fall below a functional threshold, the systems that used to run automatically begin failing quietly. The word doesn't disappear from your vocabulary. It disappears from access.

This was not information my GP had offered. It was not something the neurologist had raised. It was sitting in published research and no one in mainstream medicine had connected it to what I was describing in eighteen months of consultations.

This was not information my GP had offered. It was sitting in published research.

The reason the supplements I had tried hadn't addressed this is that they weren't targeting the right layer. Magnesium and ashwagandha are not wrong — they help with separate aspects of the same broader picture. HRT addressed the hormonal layer of perimenopause, which was real and worth treating. None of them reached the cellular energy deficit that was producing the cognitive symptoms.

What changed the equation was delivery format.

Oral NAD+ supplements — NMN and NR — are precursor molecules that the body must convert into NAD+ through a multi-step enzymatic process. Each step involves losses. Each step depends on gut health and enzyme availability, both of which decline with age. What arrives at the cellular level after swallowing a capsule is a fraction of what was on the label — and that fraction gets smaller every year.

Subcutaneous injection delivers the molecule directly. No conversion chain. No gut degradation. It enters systemic circulation as NAD+ because it never had to become anything else. This is the format that actually arrives.

I have been using the NADPure protocol for four months.

The word-finding started improving in the third week. It was not a dramatic moment. I was in a meeting and I noticed I had not lost a word in forty minutes. That was unusual enough to notice. The following week, the same. By week six I had stopped keeping the compulsive notes — the lists of names, the conversation thread reminders, the backup structure for a brain I had stopped trusting to run itself.

"I stopped laughing at things" was the sentence that told me something was seriously wrong. I noticed I was laughing again before my husband mentioned it. That is how I knew the protocol was working.

NADPure is a subcutaneous injection pen for at-home use, shipped as high-purity NAD+ powder and activated before use. Each pen contains a pre-measured 500mg dose — batch-verified, independently laboratory tested, results available on request. The activation step takes approximately 30 seconds: add sterile solution, mix gently, load the pen. The injection itself is fine-gauge subcutaneous. Most people describe a mild, brief sensation. Total time: under 90 seconds. It is not a supplement in the conventional sense. There is no capsule, no conversion chain, and no question of whether the molecule survived the journey — because you activated it minutes before it entered your body.

I am not going to claim the protocol replaced everything else. HRT did things the protocol did not do. The protocol did things HRT did not do. What I have at four months is the executive function I had at 44. The processing speed. The ability to hold a room's multiple threads simultaneously and respond to the one that matters without losing the others. Back to being the fastest thinker in rooms I had quietly stopped walking into.

I lost eighteen months. I ran a business on emergency reserves for eighteen months because nobody connected two pieces of publicly available research for me in time. That is the part that stays. Not the decline — the delay. All of it was solvable. That is the sentence that still makes me angry.