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Biomedical briefing

Nature Medicine volume 18, pages 1600–1601 (2012)Cite this article

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Patient push Patient advocacy groups' lobbying for research funding seems to be paying off. According to a study published in the October issue of American Sociological Review (77, 780–803, 2012), the more a disease nonprofit spends to pressure the US government on focused science spending, the more that federal funding agencies allocate to the specific disease that the organization concentrates on. “This is an area where advocacy can be incredibly successful,” says study author Rachel Kahn Best, a public health fellow at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Best looked at lobbying activities and budget allocations for 53 diseases over a span of 19 years. She found that for every $1,000 a group spent on lobbying, the US National Institutes of Health or the Department of Defense dished out an additional $25,000 on average in funding for that disease the following year.

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Change history

  • 06 December 2012

     The November 2012 issue's “Biomedical briefing” (Nat. Med. 18, 1600–1601, 2012) misspelled Madhav Thambisetty’s first name as Madhev and incorrectly stated his location as Bethesda, Maryland, when he is actually based in Baltimore. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Biomedical briefing. Nat Med 18, 1600–1601 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1112-1600

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