(548) NIH Funding Trends for Men's and Women's Urologic Conditions
Authors: May E , Hanley M , Gross M 
Published: May 2023

Introduction

Existing literature reports a general trend of increasing National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for surgeon-scientists in America and shows that urology has not benefited from this trend. NIH funding for urologists continues to lag behind that of our peers in other surgical specialties. Between 2010-2019 urology departments received the second-lowest amount of NIH funding of all surgical specialties, only above plastic surgery. The literature also shows that NIH awards significantly less money to male cancer research (i.e., prostate cancer) than female cancer research (i.e., breast cancer). We sought to explore further gender-specific grant variation within NIH urologic funding by exploring dollars awarded to benign gender-specific non-cancer topics of urologic research. We hypothesized that an NIH funding disparity would exist between men’s health urologic research and research devoted to women’s health urologic issues.

Objective

To explore NIH funding trends for men's and women's urologic health conditions via the NIH Reporter database

Methods

We used the publicly available NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results (NIH RePORTER) to perform our data collection. NIH RePORTER is an online search tool of the repository of NIH-funded research projects and is linked to publications, patents and clinical trials resulting from NIH funding. Data was queried for a ten-year period between 2012-2021. We used uniform search parameters including “Department Type: urology” to filter for publications from departments of urology, “Funding Mechanism: research project grant” to eliminate R&D, and “Award Type: new” to capture only first-time awards in our search period. All authors were included in our search, which encompassed both trainees and non-trainees independent of Activity Code. We selected four women’s urological health issues and four men’s urological health issues to guide a keyword search. Our women’s urological health issues included overactive bladder, incontinence, and pelvic organ prolapse. In addition, we queried the NIH Spending Category of “Women’s Health”. Our men’s urological health issues include erectile dysfunction, Peyronie's disease, hypogonadism and male stress incontinence. Search terms related to these health conditions were used to query project title, projects terms and project abstracts in the NIH RePORTER.

Results

Results of our research findings are summarized in Table 1. Of the 12 projects identified that exclusively investigate either a men’s health condition or a women’s health condition, 7 focused on men’s health and 5 on women’s health. NIH spending on women’s health issues exceeded that for men's health conditions by $833,964, a 51% difference, even though fewer projects were identified related to women’s health conditions. Overall, fewer gender-exclusive projects were found than expected. For example, incontinence projects frequently included both male and female-bodied participants.

Conclusions

NIH appears to devote substantially less funding for investigating benign urologic men’s health issues than benign urologic women’s health issues. Further examination of this funding gap is warranted, and if confirmed it would be prudent to improve NIH urologic funding in general and men’s health research funding specifically.

Disclosure

Any of the authors act as a consultant, employee or shareholder of an industry for: Coloplast.