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We get questions all the time about how much we spend on a variety of diseases and conditions—breast cancer research, Alzheimer’s disease, or childhood leukemia to name a few. Luckily, there is an easy way to find out. Go to RePORT’s Categorical Spending page. Listed there are 233 diseases, conditions, and areas of research. Each year in February, we update the numbers, and the latest set (actual fiscal year 2011 spending) has just been posted.
With the doubling of the NIH budget between 1998 and 2003 and the coinciding internet technology boom, there was demand for a consistent categorization process for all extramural grants, intramural projects, R&D contracts, and inter/intra agency agreements. Congress requested we provide an automated, electronic solution for NIH-wide categorization of research projects, and so, our Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) Project was born. We started by developing and defining the scientific categories. Then, by mining scientific words and multi-word phrases from NIH projects, we assign projects to one or more categories.
We released the first categorical funding data in January 2009, which categorized fiscal year 2008 awards. If you visit the website, you will see for each category actual funding levels by year, as well as funding estimates for the next two fiscal years. Clicking on a number will provide a detailed project listing for your category of interest, and you can find out further information about each project by clicking on the project number.
One question I always get is, “Why do the amounts add up to more than the annual budget level?” Here is the answer. The categories are not mutually exclusive. A particular project can, and often does, fall into more than one category. In these cases, the amount of funding for the project is counted in each assigned category.
I am happy to report that we’ve found other ways of using this categorization process to help us here at NIH, as well as provide useful information to the extramural community. The “similar projects” tab in a project listing in RePORTER uses the RCDC technology and data, as does the “LikeThis” tool we recently developed for investigators to use within the eRA Commons.
RCDC provides more insight into what research NIH is supporting, and I hope you will take a look.
I checked out the NIH spending by category. If I’m interpreting the numbers correctly, the data suggest that $2.6 billion is spent on “aging” research. This represents approximately 8.5% of the NIH budget. Unfortunately, I suspect that much of the research in the “aging” category may not address the health issues of our nation’s growing older population.
Given the impact of the aging of America on the Federal Budget, the NIH needs to adopt policies that increase spending in this category dramatically across all institutes. Although only 13% of the US population is over age 65, this segment of the population accounts for more than 1/3rd of health care expenditures. The oldest old – those over the age of 85 years – is the fastest growing segment of the population. Yet, research is not available to treat common problems for this rapidly growing group. The twenty percent of older adults with four or more chronic conditions account for 80% of health care expenditures. Older adults have been excluded from clinical trials and most NIH research, especially the oldest old and those persons with multiple chronic conditions.
Therefore, we need for every NIH institute to have a strategic plan for how to address the aging of America, so that we have a better understanding of geriatric syndromes and conditions, the complexity of age-related chronic diseases and the co-occurence of multiple conditions, and how this affects prevention, diagosis, and management. The amount of NIH funding from each institute for aging and geriatrics should be commensurate with the lack of knowledge related to the age-related conditions and diseases in each institute’s funding portfolio and the cost of those conditions within the Medicare population. Thus, 30% or more of the NIH budget should be going to aging and geriatrics. Obviously, the NIA budget and research focus alone is far too small and narrow to address all the important age-related issues related to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, arthritis, kidney disease, etc in the older population. We need for NCI, NHLBI, NIDDK, and all the other institutes to develop a strategy for addressing the Aging of America.
To address the lack of older adults in clinical research studies, policies should also be adopted to include a review of the plan for recruiting persons over the age of 65, similar to the criteria for women, minorities, and children.
These are my personal views and are not those of my university or any specific professional organization.
Since one particular project can fall into more than one category, the total amount may exceed (rather than lower than) the NIH budget. How about generate another table with the following arrangement. When one particular project falls into more than one category, divide the funding by the number of categories and assign the divided amount into each category. This will give us a different perception of which scientific area has been funded more. In addition, the total amount of the table will not exceed NIH budget. It will be interesting to see the total amount compared to the $30 billions approved by the congress.
I am looking for a Thyroid Disease total amount awarded in recent years. Please advise.
If you are interested in an area of research that is not one of NIH’s official reporting categories, you can get a general idea of the numbers and types of grants that NIH supports by searching RePORTER.
It is pretty sad to me that we spend almost as much funding AIDS research as we do on the rest of infectious diseases combined. An increase in AIDS funding was a mid-80’s response to an emerging threat, and was very necessary at that time. But how does this continue to be justifiable 25 years later?