Aging Research Funding Holds Steady in '04 Request

Proposed budget preserves big gains of the last 5 years.

The budget request that President George W. Bush submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2004 represents a leveling off of funding for biomedical research, but the new numbers preserve for the moment the sizable gains made over the last 5 years. This is good news for scientists who conduct research on aging and the diseases of the elderly.

Most research on aging is funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which serves as the main conduit for health-research money in the federal government. The Bush Administration has asked Congress to boost NIH's budget $500 million to $27.7 billion of new money--a 2% hike over its 2003 allocation.

Although not particularly impressive, the increase, adjusted for inflation, protects a near doubling of the agency's budget that was mandated by Congress in 1998 to be completed this year. The National Institute on Aging (NIA), the agency within NIH that funds most aging-specific research grants, did slightly better than its parent, receiving a 3.8% budget increase to $994 million.

"We're happy," says NIA Budget Officer Kevin Laser. "It's as much as we thought we would get." With a recessionary budget and the nation on the brink of war, few research advocates in Washington were surprised by the new numbers. "It's in the neighborhood of what we expected," says David Moore, associate vice president of the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. "The administration has been pretty clear that there would be a significant slowdown in the rate of growth."

Teasing out aging-related research funding from the 26 institutes that comprise NIH is more art than science. Nearly every institute conducts relevant work--from studies of the basic biology of aging to those on illnesses that afflict the elderly disproportionately, including arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease. According to internal estimates supplied by each institute, NIH overall plans to spend $2.1 billion, or 7.6% of its total budget, on aging-related research in 2004--up about $100 million from this year. That number is likely to be conservative: The National Cancer Institute and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute combined are slated to spend $7.7 billion next year.

NIA funds research in four basic areas: the biology of aging, behavioral and social research, neuroscience and the neuropsychology of aging, and geriatrics and clinical gerontology. These programs support research in fields such as cell biology, cognitive aging, epidemiology, sleep, and neurobiology.

Congress boosted funding for Alzheimer's research in the 1980s, and most of that money now flows through NIA, says Huber Warner, associate director of NIA's Biology of Aging program. Almost half of NIA's budget goes to the neuroscience program (primarily to support Alzheimer's research); the rest is split among the remaining three programs, says Warner.

In budget documents recently submitted to Congress, NIA officials outlined plans to focus efforts in the coming year on developing improved electronic imaging techniques for diagnosing Alzheimer's and searching for biological markers associated with the disease. Researchers funded by NIA will also be testing new approaches to developing drugs that treat this disorder, which affects one in 10 persons over 65 and nearly half of those over 85, according to the Alzheimer's Association. NIA also plans to zero in on the risk factors for the mild forms of cognitive impairment that often lead to Alzheimer's. Treating such problems before they escalate into the full-blown disease could save on the estimated $100 billion spent each year on caring for those stricken with the illness.

In addition to research on Alzheimer's disease, NIA is moving ahead on an Aging Intervention Testing Program, designed to rigorously assess compounds that appear to slow the aging process in animals. The effort falls under the Biology of Aging program.

With its modest increase in funding, NIA should be able to add an additional 32 grants in 2004, bringing the number to 1783, according to agency budget materials. The new grants will fall across the range of work funded by the institute.

Despite the recent doubling of the NIH budget, some research advocates argue that the administration's 2004 request is far too low to sustain the momentum of the newly bulked-up agency. "This is not a time to be faint-hearted," says Steven Teitelbaum, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). "We don't want to see the investment ... squandered."

FASEB and other groups plan to ask Congress to support a 10% increase in NIH's 2004 budget, says Teitelbaum. The Bush request would pay for 344 new NIH grants, he says. Previous budgets funded between 600 and 1000. Kei Koizumi, director of the Research and Development Budget and Policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (publisher of SAGE Crossroads), says that plenty of NIH supporters in Congress will back the call for more money.

The administration's request will be taken up by Congress and reviewed by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The House and Senate Appropriations committees will make final NIH budgetary decisions in the fall. In the meantime, other longtime observers of the NIH budget wars such as Laser and Warner say that research advocates will likely have to once again get used to leaner increases nearer to the rate of inflation. "This is how it was before 1998," says Laser. Now that the Wall Street bubble has burst and the economy is stubbornly unwilling to show signs of recovery, it might be this way for a while.

Randy Barrett is a freelance writer and journalist based in Falls Church, Virginia. His back hurts in the morning, and he is now certain that youth is wasted on the young.