The Relation between Funding by the National Institutes of Health and the Burden of Disease

A cross-sectional study comparing estimates of disease-specific funding in 1996 with data on six measures of the burden of disease found that the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, breast cancer, diabetes mellitus, and dementia all received relatively generous funding, regardless of which measure was used as the basis for calculating support.

Abstract

The amount of NIH funding for research on a disease is associated with the burden of the disease; however, different measures of the burden of disease may yield different conclusions about the appropriateness of disease-specific funding levels.