How Does NIH Allocate Its Research Funding?

Around 7.2 million people aged 65 and over are living with Alzheimer’s dementia in the United States, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The charity estimates that this could rise to 13.8 million by 2060 if no medical breakthroughs come in time to prevent, slow or cure the disease. However, pharmaceutical companies have a number of drugs in development, targeting different symptoms, from inflammation to synaptic plasticity/neuroprotection pathways.

Research funding into Alzheimer’s disease has increased over the years. Where the National Institutes for Health (NIH) allocated just $504 million to the field in 2013, that had risen to $3.6 billion by 2024. While this is more than the funding going to research for many other diseases, many experts believe research into the disease remains underfunded.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded 140,077 deaths from Alzheimer’s in the United States in 2023. However, a recent study by Rush University Medical Center found that Alzheimer’s could be an underlying cause of five to six times as many deaths than currently reported. On a global scale, the World Health Organization estimates that 1.8 million people died from the disease in 2019 (latest available data). This is based on modeled estimates.

In March of this year, the Trump administration halted the funding of 14 out of 35 NIH-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers. In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee then approved a $100 million increase for Alzheimer’s and dementia research funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the 2026 fiscal year. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, if signed into law, this would bring the total annual funding to $3.9 billion.

To provide some perspective, cancer research was allocated $8.1 billion from the NIH in 2024. Cancer is the second biggest cause of death worldwide, with 9.7 million people estimated to have died from various forms of the disease in 2022. The leading cause of death worldwide is heart disease. In 2022, heart disease claimed the lives of an estimated 19.8 million people. A total of $1.8 billion was allocated by the NIH on research into the disease in 2024.