A novel argument for increasing the NIH budget

In this week’s online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Duke University demographer Kenneth Manton and colleagues compared death rates from 1950 to 2004 for four big killers—heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes—with the rising budgets of their corresponding NIH institutes. For all but diabetes deaths, which have risen recently because of rising rates of obesity, they found an inverse correlation between budgets and age-adjusted death rates 10 years later. And when they plotted the total NIH budget versus overall mortality rates (see graph), they found an “excellent” regression fit.