Few words carry the weight of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. They bring uncertainty, fear and questions about what the future will hold, not only for the person receiving the diagnosis, but also for the spouse, children and loved ones who will face the future together.

After more than six decades of marriage, retired U.S. Air Force colonels Oak DeBerg, PhD, and Joellen de Berg know that reality all too well. Having watched both her mother and sister live with Alzheimer’s disease, Joellen recognized the early signs when memory concerns began affecting her own life. Determined to find answers, the couple turned to the internationally recognized Alzheimer’s specialists at UT Health San Antonio’s Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Today, Joellen is participating in clinical research designed to help scientists better understand Alzheimer’s disease and identify it earlier. Like thousands of research volunteers across the country, she isn’t participating only for herself. She is helping advance discoveries that could one day change the future for families facing Alzheimer’s around the world.

“When someone chooses to participate in a clinical trial, they contribute to discoveries that can improve care for countless others,” said Therica Miller, MBA, CCRP, UT San Antonio’s associate vice president for clinical research administration. “Clinical trials are conducted under rigorous safety and ethical standards and provide the evidence needed to develop new treatments, improve patient care and advance medical knowledge. Many of today’s most important medical breakthroughs were made possible because patients and research participants chose to take part in clinical research.”

Why clinical research matters

Clinical trials help physicians determine the safest and most effective treatments while advancing new discoveries that improve care for future patients.

At any given time, UT Health San Antonio, the academic health center of The University of Texas at San Antonio, has more than 500 active clinical research studies underway. Every year, another 80 to 100 clinical trials begin, spanning conditions such as dementia, cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory care, behavior and mental wellness, oral health and many others.

Clinical research takes many forms, and participation looks different from one study to the next. While some clinical trials evaluate promising new therapies over an extended period, others explore everyday health questions and may involve only a single visit or a brief survey. At UT Health San Antonio, researchers are studying everything from how movement-based practices such as tai chi influence balance and mobility to whether certain oral health products strengthen tooth enamel.

Other studies, such as the ones Joellen is participating in, take aim at some of medicine’s most complex challenges, effectively changing the way diseases are understood and treated with new or improved therapies, medical devices or surgical techniques.

Recently, UT Health San Antonio researchers, physicians and patient volunteers conducted landmark studies involving rhenium obisbemeda, a drug shown to more than double survival rates for patients with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. Another study pinpointed an earlier stage of Type 2 diabetes, termed “pre-prediabetes,” revealing that changes in the body occur long before prediabetic criteria are met, information health providers can consider to prevent disease in their patients.

Each breakthrough began as a question. And every person who enrolls in a clinical trial contributes to the scientific evidence that shapes the future of medicine.

How clinical trials work

Long before a potential new treatment reaches patients, scientists spend years studying diseases, testing promising ideas and carefully evaluating the results. Only after extensive research and rigorous safety and ethical reviews are potential therapies considered for clinical trials, where participant safety remains the highest priority.

When a promising approach is ready for human evaluation, it enters the clinical trial process. Researchers carefully evaluate safety and effectiveness through multiple phases of study before a treatment can receive approval for widespread use.

That process can take years, even decades.

And that level of scrutiny is intentional.

Every clinical trial follows a detailed research plan. Institutional review boards evaluate studies to ensure participant safety and ethical conduct. Volunteers receive detailed information about the study and must provide informed consent before participating. Throughout the process, researchers continuously monitor results and safety data.

These safeguards exist to protect participants while ensuring that the knowledge gained is scientifically sound.

The result is a system designed to answer one fundamental question: Does this approach truly improve human health?

A personal decision that can help many

Participating in Alzheimer’s research is deeply personal for Oak and Joellen.

“I guess because the disease is so prevalent in our family, I’m really glad that they’re working so hard to try and find every way that they can to deal with it,” Joellen said.

Many volunteers participate because they want to contribute to scientific knowledge. Others seek access to specialized expertise and close, personalized monitoring by clinical research teams. Some hope to advance understanding of diseases that have affected their families.

The value of that work is bigger than any single patient, according to Oak.

“Many people who have not been around Alzheimer’s think it involves one individual, and it really does not,” he said. “It involves not only the individual but the family members, friends and really the whole community.”

“Every person who volunteers for a clinical study becomes part of something much larger than themselves,” Miller said. “Whether a study lasts one visit or several years, each participant helps answer questions that move medicine forward. Their willingness to contribute today has the potential to improve the health and quality of life of families and communities they may never meet.”

SAN ANTONIO, June 9, 2026 – UT Health San Antonio has been selected as a recipient of the American Cancer Society’s Self-Collected Human Papillomavirus Readiness Pilot (SHaRP) grant, a national initiative designed to help health care organizations prepare for and implement HPV self-collection as part of routine cervical cancer screening.

SHaRP supports the integration of human papillomavirus (HPV) self-collection into primary care and other clinical settings. This approach allows patients to collect their own samples for HPV testing and may help reduce barriers to screening while expanding access for people who are not regularly screened.

The project is led by Ramon S. Cancino, MD, MBA, MS, FAAFP, executive director of the UT Health San Antonio Primary Care Center and professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine. Cancino is also senior medical director of medical management, and co-chair of the Mays Cancer Center and UT Health San Antonio Joint Cancer Prevention and Screening Committee.

“HPV self-collection has the potential to make cervical cancer screening more accessible for patients who face barriers to traditional screening,” said Cancino. “This pilot gives us an opportunity to understand how to integrate it into everyday primary care in a way that is practical, safe and centered on patients.”

Expanding access to cervical cancer screening

According to the National Cancer Institute, persistent infection with certain types of HPV is one of the primary causes of cervical cancer. The American Cancer Society recommends starting screenings, which may include a Pap test, HPV test or a combination of both, at age 25 for average risk. Regular screenings can detect precancerous changes before cancer develops, and they can identify cervical cancer at its earliest, most treatable stages. Self-collected HPV tests are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in health care facilities under the supervision of a healthcare provider.

Testing HPV self-collection in primary care settings

As part of the pilot, UT Health San Antonio will implement and evaluate workflows for HPV self-collection in real-world primary care settings. The work focuses on how the approach can be integrated into routine care, how it affects screening and follow-up processes, and how patients and providers experience it in practice.

“Through this program, we are translating research into practice so that innovation reaches the patients who most need cervical cancer screening,” said Sarah M. Temkin, MD, FACS, senior director of Early Detection at the American Cancer Society.

Advancing cervical cancer screening in Texas

The initiative comes at an important time in Texas, where cervical cancer screening rates remain below national goals and adherence to recommended screening continues to lag behind national benchmarks.

By testing self-collection in clinical settings, the project aims to better understand how this model can improve access to preventive care, increase participation in recommended screening and support earlier detection of cervical cancer.

The grant provides $30,000 in funding and runs through March 2027. Work begins with a planning phase in April 2026, followed by implementation and evaluation phases.

This project reflects UT Health San Antonio’s ongoing commitment to advancing cancer prevention, strengthening early detection efforts and evaluating innovative strategies that expand access to care.

SAN ANTONIO, April 27, 2026 – Can jet lag cause more than just sleep loss? Do quick-grab, high-fat foods associated with late-night or rotating work shifts bring more than indigestion? Those circadian rhythm disruptors might also contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

UT Health San Antonio, the academic health center of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UT San Antonio), was recently awarded a highly competitive Alzheimer’s Association research grant to investigate how such environmental stressors may contribute to an increased risk for the disease.

While Alzheimer’s is a highly heritable disease with about 60% of the risk coming from a person’s genes, the remaining risk is less well-studied and may, in part, come from environmental stressors. Sleep loss, for example, can change the amount of tau and amyloid in the brain. The aggregation of tau proteins and amyloid plaques are well-known hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

“We are trying to incorporate as many genetic variants and environmental stressors as we can to have a robust model that mimics late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, as opposed to other preclinical work that shows early onset, highly aggressive, non-physiological models,” said principal investigator Juan Pablo Palavicini, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology in the Joe R. and Teresa Long School of Medicine, and a researcher with the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, both under UT San Antonio.

The grant examining this gene-environment interaction begins this month and provides $200,000 to fund the study over the next three years.

Circadian disruption as an environmental stressor

Palavicini is teaming with Kevin B. Koronowski, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Structural Biology in the Long School of Medicine and researcher with the Barshop Institute, to primarily study the effects of circadian rhythm disruption as an environmental stressor and its effects on human phosphorylated-tau proteins.

“In modern society, it’s difficult to reduce environmental stressors like disrupted sleep schedules and diet,” Koronowski said. “That is the whole point of our study. We don’t yet know all the potential consequences of this disruption.”

With Koronowski’s expertise in circadian rhythm, the team developed an earlier study funded by the William and Ella Owens Medical Foundation. A chronic jet lag condition was created in an animal model by shifting the light-dark schedule forward by eight hours twice per week.

“It is as if you traveled from Texas to Europe, from Europe to Australia and then back to Texas,” Palavicini said.

During that study, some mice started misbehaving and developing metabolic abnormalities, but the effects were not strong. For the upcoming study, the research team will incorporate changes to create more dramatic consequences of circadian rhythm disruption.

“A key adjustment will be to start the process in middle-aged subjects instead of younger ones to account for age-related resiliency and recovery capacity,” Palavicini said.

For the upcoming study, researchers will also provide a Western diet with higher fat and sugar content. Many clinical studies show that people who work rotating or night shifts tend to have lower-quality diets. In replicating actual human scenarios of circadian disruption, Koronowski said it makes sense to include dietary stress.

“This type of food falls perfectly into the big picture of what we are doing,” he said. “This shows the additional stress of an unhealthy diet that many people eat, the typical Western-style diet.”

The research team is also proposing a second aim of the study in which they will determine if a time-restricted feeding schedule rescues circadian disruption-induced metabolic abnormality.

In their previous study, the team noticed the chronic jet lag caused eating at all times of the day and night. In the upcoming study, they will have an automated system that only allows for feeding 12 hours a day.

Cause or effect?

“We are especially testing whether restoring metabolic rhythms while light is disrupted can prevent the progression of Alzheimer’s disease,” Koronowski said. “In the context of neurodegeneration, we still don’t know if circadian disruption is a cause or effect, so this study can help us determine that.”

Rather than only focusing on the genetic component, Koronowski said this study is a more holistic view of health and how loss of homeostasis in the body and misalignment of natural rhythms can contribute to disease.

“Night is a critical time for our brains because these proteins that accumulate, like tau and amyloid beta, get flushed out as we are sleeping,” Palavicini said. “The different stages of sleep, especially REM, are essential for memory consolidation. Disrupted sleep, even for one night, can alter the amount of tau and amyloid in the brain substantially.”

Findings from this study could help clarify how environmental stressors such as disrupted sleep and diet interact with genetic risk, offering new insight into how Alzheimer’s disease develops later in life.

Other researchers on the team include Qing Zhang, MD, a research scientist in Koronowski’s lab, and Andrea Gonzalez, a student associate in Palavicini’s lab.

Carolina Solis-Herrera, MD, founding director, Center for Excellence in Diabetes, and chief, Division of Endocrinology, was interviewed live for “The Source” program.

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