CBS News corespondent Natalie Morales maintains a very active lifestyle, which is beneficial for brain health. (Photo: Courtesy of Natalie Morales)
Courtesy of Natalie Morales
If you do a Google, Bing, Duck-Duck-Go or Perplexity search for “53 years of age,” you’ll find lots of stuff on the Internet about how great it is to be that age and how happy 53-year-olds tend to be. For CBS News Correspondent Natalie Morales, though, being 53 years of age does bring something else to mind—namely the importance of brain health.
“My mother-in-law’s name was Kay Rhodes, and she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease right around my age,” Morales recently told me. “When you’re dealt that blow, whether as the patient, as a caregiver or as part of the family, it’s a blow that affects the entire family. And it certainly did with our families.” Rhodes went on to pass away in March 2014 at the age of 72. “She lived with the disease for 17 years because her body was still young,” Morales explained. “But at that point, her brain and her mind were far gone.” And Morales, who also used to anchor the Today show on the West Coast and host the CBS series “The Talk,” talked to me about what happened and why she’s now talking about brain health.
What Is Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease
Morales used the term early-onset because that’s what you would call any appearance of Alzheimer’s disease before the age of 65. And early-onset or younger-onset does account for about five to 10 percent of all Alzheimer’s cases. If you somehow think that Alzheimer’s disease is exclusively for older adults, you’d be wrong as a bathroom gong. Early-onset can be as early as one’s 40s.
“My mother-in-law was diagnosed in early 2000 but really started showing symptoms two years prior,” Morales recalled. “She took cognitive assessments, and the findings were somewhat inconclusive when she took them. It wasn’t until two years later, when she was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic, and at that point, we saw that it had already progressed dramatically.”
I’ve written about Alzheimer’s disease before for Forbes back in 2022 and again in 2025. It is the most common cause of dementia—accounting for about 60 to 70 percent of cases. A characteristic of the disease is the progressive build-up of proteins in the brain that eventually manifest as what’s called amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Such stuff can then impinge on normal brain tissue, which may result in more and more brain cells dying over time. This, in turn, over time leads the brain to shrink and the associated symptoms and decline.
What Are The Symptoms Of Early Onset of Alzheimer’s Disease
The symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease are pretty much the same as Alzheimer’s disease in general. They just start earlier—at a younger age. And in the same way, the memory loss, cognitive decline and disorientation get progressively worse over time.
“We saw the symptoms back when I first met her,” Morales recalled. “It was the mid 1990s, and she would repeat herself in conversations. She would have memory or thinking issues that were sort of typical.” Diagnosing Rhodes wasn’t super straightforward, though. “She was also a menopausal woman, as am I perimenopausal,” Morales added. “So, there’s always that question of, could this be something brain fog? They were also at the time when she and my father-in-law were going through a pretty dramatic move and changes in their lives. So, there were a lot of things that we were thinking could have contributed, but at the same time, we didn’t understand until we started to see real repetition of behavior.”
As time went on, the symptoms became more prominent. “She started to have anxiety and a little bit of sundowning later in the evenings and would go to bed really early and was really afraid to go places by herself,” Morales described. “She would get lost and she had difficulty completing pretty familiar tasks. So those memory and thinking issues really started to present within those two years.”
Morales brought up a particular instance when “it really came to light. [My husband and I] were getting married. This was August 1998. We sent our wedding bands to their house in Colorado, where the wedding ceremony was gonna take place. She signed for them, hid them, because of that paranoia that she was starting to exhibit, and hid them so well that she forgot where she put them, so we had to get new wedding bands. It wasn’t until after she died, when my father-in-law was cleaning through one of her drawers that he found those wedding bands in there.”
When I asked whether her mother-in-law was aware of her symptoms, Morales replied, “Yeah, she was aware and afraid what was happening to her. She would get lost. walking in the neighborhood, which was a very familiar neighborhood and people knew her. She would have to have ask her neighbors to help her get back to her house.” Morales continued by saying, “She did not want to talk about it, I think there was a little bit of shame, and she withdrew within herself as so many people who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s tend to do. Their world becomes a little bit smaller.”
Early Diagnosis Of Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Is Important
Natalie Morales (R) hosted the CBS series THE TALK and is seen here with (L to R) Akbar Gbajabiamila, Amanda Kloots, Sheryl Underwood and Jerry O’Connell. (Photo by Terence Patrick/CBS via Getty Images)
CBS via Getty Images
It was a different time, too. “Back then, there weren’t any disease modifying treatments or therapies,” Morales lamented. Since then, though, the longtime NBC and CBS reporter in Morales continued to ask questions. And, importantly, seek answers to those questions.
“Now, there are options, and Kisunla being an important one of them,” Morales said. “It’s an amyloid targeting therapy that can be so beneficial.” Kisunla is the brand name for donanemab, an intravenous medication specifically for early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. Morales has partnered with Eli Lilly, the makers of Kisunla to encourage more people talk to doctors and become aware of Alzheimer’s disease treatment options. Kisunla is not the only amyloid targeting therapy out there as there is also Leqembi—the brand name for another intravenous medication lecanemab, manufactured by Eisai Co.and Biogen.
In addition to such newer types of medications that may help delay the progression of Alzheimer’s disease especially at its earlier stages, there are also lifestyle changes. Morales mentioned endeavoring to “work on your brain health and challenge your brain health every day.” This can include “doing familiar tasks in different ways or challenge your brain differently, to not always be comfortable with doing things the comfortable way.” She mentioned switching the hands you use to brush your teeth, doing puzzles and getting exercise as examples.
“I want to encourage people to have those conversations with their primary caregivers, to talk to their loved ones as well,” Morales emphasized. “If you notice memory and thinking issues with your family member, or even with yourself, it’s important to have all of these conversations as seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s right now, but in the next four to five years, that number is increasing exponentially up to 9 million, perhaps by 2030 with baby boomers aging.”
Earlier diagnosis can help with caregiving too. Morales pointed our how her mother-in-law went from “loving and vibrant” to not as “happy-go-lucky” to even “combative with my father-in-law. He was the one who was dealing with the brunt of it. He was her primary caregiver for more than 10 years.” Morales added, “When you’re faced with the daily task of taking care of your loved one in this way, it can be very challenging, and it certainly took a toll on his own health as well.”
Caregivers need to have the necessary resources and support network and know what the wishes of the person to be cared for may be in advance. And that requires planning. So the earlier potential caregivers know what’s going on, the more time there is to plan. And as Morales indicated, caregiving can involve challenging balances. “We didn’t understand how to approach it at the time because, we were trying to give [Rhodes] as much ownership and making her feel as comfortable as she could feel, but we also saw that she didn’t want to talk about these things, but we needed to talk about them.” Morales has already been talking to her own kids about such issues, “They are aware of the genetics with early onset and that their grandmother had early onset in her mid 50s.”
Morales is also trying to model the right behaviors for her kids. Staying very active and curious and using her brain is already part of her job as a CBS News correspondent working a lot with shows like 48 Hours and CBS Mornings. And she’s also talking about what’s important to her, which is what you might expect from a 53-year-old in the prime of her life.