Session: Primary and Secondary Prevention Research in Humans Funded By NIH from 2012 to 2017 (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

SESSION INTRODUCTION: Established in 1986, the Office of Disease Prevention (ODP) is responsible for assessing, facilitating, and stimulating research in disease prevention and health promotion across NIH. During the development of its first strategic plan in 2013, ODP determined that the existing methods to assess the portfolio of National Institutes of Health (NIH) primary and secondary prevention research in humans lacked sufficient detail to characterize studies based on important characteristics including rationale, exposures, outcomes, study setting, study design, population focus, and type of prevention research. During 2013-14, ODP developed new methods to characterize the NIH prevention research portfolio. During 2015-17, ODP’s staff manually coded 14,500 research grants across a variety of funding mechanisms awarded during fiscal years 2012-16. The selected grants included newly awarded grants classified as “prevention” using the existing NIH portfolio analysis tools and a 5% random sample of those classified as “not prevention,” allowing ODP to calculate sensitivity and specificity for the existing methods. This symposium will include three presentations based on this work.

The 1st presentation will describe an innovative approach that ODP used to characterize grants within the NIH prevention research portfolio. It will also present the results for the performance of three portfolio analysis methods used to identify NIH-funded primary and secondary prevention research in humans.

The 2nd presentation will present an analysis of the study designs used in primary and secondary prevention research in humans at NIH, including the distribution of newly awarded grants that focus on analysis of existing data, methods research, non-randomized intervention studies, observational studies, pilot/feasibility/proof-of-concept/safety studies, and randomized intervention studies. It will also discuss an analysis of the population foci used in prevention research at NIH.

The 3rd presentation will present an analysis of how the results from the NIH funding analyses align with the top ten actual and leading causes of death in the United States.

The discussant will offer his interpretation of the results and lead a discussion between the presenters and the symposium audience.