National Institutes of Health grant awards for pain, nausea, and dyspnea research: an assessment of funding patterns in 2003.

We introduce an interactive database that permits description and exploration of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding patterns for research on pain, nausea, and dyspnea. The database encompasses both basic science and clinical research. This article describes how we created the database, including the procedures we developed for reviewing and classifying research grants. In addition, it reports NIH grants and funding activity for the year 2003, with a breakdown of funding activity by Institute and funding comparisons across Institutes. It also describes a first attempt to identify clinically significant but underfunded research domains. In 2003, the NIH funded 1148 grants having relevance to the domain of pain, representing 2.5% of the total NIH research budget. Of those, 581 grants, or about 1% of the NIH budget, had a primary focus on pain. Of the diseases and conditions addressed by the current implementation, musculoskeletal conditions were the best represented with 105 grants, whereas cardiac conditions had the fewest number of grants with 7. The NIH funded 43 grants for dyspnea research and a scant 29 grants for nausea studies. We discuss the current limitations of the database and our plans for further development.

CONCLUSIONS

The interactive database and classification system for pain, nausea, and dyspnea research funded by the NIH reported on in this article represents an objective and verifiable resource for health policy makers and others interested in NIH funding decisions. The high inter-rater reliability achieved attests to the objectivity of the classification method. Initial analyses demonstrate that these data can usefully track funding patterns by NIH institutes and reveal underfunded areas of research.