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.

  1. How much does NIH spend on opioid research?

Chart 1 of 1 · Medical research

How much does NIH spend on opioid research?

The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.

NIH funded $825 million of opioid research in fiscal 2025. The category began in fiscal 2018, when NIH launched its HEAL Initiative on addiction and pain partway through the year ($317 million); the most in a year was $947 million, in fiscal 2023. These are totals of the projects listed in RePORTER, so they differ somewhat from NIH's published category estimates.

Questions to discuss

  1. In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
  2. Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
  3. 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

Open the chart and its numbers

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