Chart assignment
Charts to read and discuss
Read each chart, then answer its questions. Every chart shows its source and date; open it for a table of the numbers and the data to download.
Chart 1 of 1 · Medical research
How much does NIH spend researching major diseases?
The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.
Cancer research got the most NIH money of these major diseases in fiscal 2025, $6.97 billion, followed by HIV/AIDS ($3.95 billion) and Alzheimer's and related dementias ($2.99 billion); opioid research got $825 million. The categories are NIH's own (RCDC), and a project that studies two diseases counts in both. These are totals of the projects listed in RePORTER, so they differ somewhat from NIH's published category estimates.
Questions to discuss
- In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
- Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
- Who collected these numbers, and how recent are they? What else would you want to know before drawing a conclusion?
Source: NIH RePORTER (National Institutes of Health), Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) (Public domain (U.S. government work)) · Data as of Sep 30, 2025
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