Ronda Rousey opens up on dementia fears: Every time I forget my keys, I'm like 'that's it!'

Ronda Rousey, the first UFC women's bantamweight champion and one of the world's most media-friendly female extreme martial arts (MMA) fighters, has opened up on how she often fears she will get dementia after suffering head trauma in her fighting career.

The former WWE fighter has acknowledged that the concussions she has suffered over the years from fighting in various contact sports disciplines has put her at risk of dementia.

"Every time I forget my keys or lose my phone, I think, 'I'm dying! That's it!'" she said jokingly in an interview with The Guardian, before turning to a more serious reflection:

"I have moments when I sing a lullaby to my daughter and get a word wrong. Oh my god, this is [the onset of dementia]!'

"This morning, on my way home from dropping my daughter off for her first day of preschool, I passed streets I'd walked down hundreds of times and, for a moment, I thought, 'Where am I?' And then it's a case of 'Oh, yeah'."

Rousey also revealed that her family has a history of dementia: "There are cases of Alzheimer's and dementia in our family, and they didn't take many blows to the head," Rousey, the first woman to be inducted into the UFC hall of fame, added.

Ronda Rousey's honest revelation

The first woman to be signed by the UFC in 2012, Rousey's book, 'Our Fight', which comes out on 4 April, recounts how she accumulated an array of concussions since she started judo at the age of 11.

"The majority of the years, I had symptoms of concussion. There are degrees of severity, but the worst was getting hit in the back of the head at the Pan American [Judo] Championships in Argentina. I completely blacked out until the next morning," she said.

"I'd had far more concussions than anyone else in a 10-year judo career and so when I started MMA I didn't want anyone to know. I felt it was a personal weakness and not a neurological degeneration that I've been experiencing since I was a kid."

In 2018, she joined the WWE after her UFC run saw her go on a 12-fight winning streak from her first bout in March 2011, before her loss to Holly Holm in November 2015.

The following year, on 30 December, she lost to Brazilian Amanda Nunes, who won by knockout after 48 seconds of the first round.