The United States is in the midst of a health emergency.
“One out of three people in our entire country have pre-diabetes,” said Dr. Carolina Solis-Herrera, medical director of Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolic Health and associate professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, UT Health San Antonio. “And if you remove the pediatric population in the United States, it's one out of two.”
Solis-Herrera told TPR a lot of people with pre-diabetes will end up with diabetes but her team has just received a grant of more than a million dollars to figure out how to stop it.
“And this will be through dietary intervention to all our patients,” she said. “But then there will be three groups that will receive either an SGLT2 inhibitor, a GLP1 receptor agonist or Metformin plus Pioglitazone.”
So three different groups will take different medications currently used to treat diabetes to see which drug or drug combination works best, and to try to tease out why they work the way they do.
“Our overarching goal is to prevent the development of diabetes and actually reverse pre-diabetes to normal glucose,” she said. “So, normalize pre-diabetes and that prevents diabetes. So, in a way, making a big dent and hopefully one day eradicating diabetes.”
The $1.2 million grant was awarded by the Baptist Health Foundation of San Antonio.
Volunteers interested in participating in this study can reach out to nurse practitioner Deanna Juarez at 210-450-9059 and juarezd2@uthscsa.edu.
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, about how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
