Physician Assistant Alum Tackled Alzheimer’s Disease Capstone Project

When Chrislyn Cabonilas, MMS ’22, was studying for her end-of-rotation exams in family medicine during her time in the Physician Assistant (PA) Studies program at Salus University, she was exposed to a section on dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

During this time, she learned hormone replacement therapy could potentially help Alzheimer’s patients. Soon thereafter, during her women’s health rotation, hormone replacement therapy was once again listed as a potential prevention against Alzheimer’s.

Things started to click in her head. Prior to entering the PA program at Salus, Cabonilas took a gap year after earning a biology degree with a concentration in pre-med/health professions from Shippensburg University in 2019. During that time, she worked as a caregiver in several Alzheimer’s units and many of her patients had late-stage dementia.

“It’s a very sad disease. As a medical community, there’s not much we can do for these patients,” said Cabonilas. “I became interested in menopausal women that required hormone replacement therapy for their symptoms and whether being on this treatment was affecting their Alzheimer's risk. I then became really interested in women’s health, especially those women who after going through menopause sometimes needed hormone replacement therapy.”

She put all those pieces together and came up with a topic for her capstone project titled “Can hormone replacement therapy decrease the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease in women?” There was some current research on the subject, but a lot of the studies were looking at hormone replacement therapy as a means of stopping the progression of Alzheimer’s rather than using it as a preventative measure for the disease.

“A lot of patients that were being started on hormone replacement therapy had already developed Alzheimer’s,” said Cabonilas. “There was just too many variations and formulas used because there’s so many different types of hormone replacement therapies that can be prescribed.” The end result - there just wasn’t enough data and research to support her clinical question.

She called her capstone project a “daunting task” when she first started it, and although her research didn’t yield clear results, hormone replacement therapy as a way to help prevent Alzheimer’s is a topic she could potentially follow up with in the future. 

“Once we got into the research and did it step-by-step and submitted our paper in segments, by the end, I felt very accomplished and proud of my work,” she said even if it didn’t start out that way.