The National Institutes of Health Saves Lives

Medical advances made possible by NIH research have saved millions of lives.  In fact, NIH-funded research has been the basis of most of the discoveries in the past 50 years that have improved human health.

In the United States alone, NIH research has led to:

• An 80 percent overall five-year survival rate for childhood cancers;
• A 70 percent decline in AIDS-related deaths between 1995 and 2001;
• A more than 40 percent decline in sudden infant death syndrome rates between 1994 and 2000;
• Forty and 51 percent declines, respectively, in death rates from heart disease and stroke between 1975 and 2000;
• The ability to eliminate or greatly reduce symptoms in 80 percent of schizophrenia patients and to improve the quality of life for more than 19 million individuals suffering from depression; and,
• A blood supply that is the safest in the world.

And, thanks to NIH research, vaccines now protect hundreds of millions of people worldwide from severe, even fatal, infectious diseases such as rubella, whooping cough, and pneumococcal pneumonia.

Of course, statistics measuring lives saved are in a certain sense measuring the immeasurable.  The value of every single life is inestimable.  Yet we can say with confidence that NIH supported research has had an enormous across-the-board impact on American health…and, far more stunning medical advances are in prospect.  They will change the way health care is provided in the 21st century. 

NIH achievements – and the even more dramatic advances ahead – are the products of thousands of creative, dedicated medical researchers, passionate in their determination to save lives.  Among them are more than 100 Nobel laureates, five of whom made their prize-winning discoveries in NIH laboratories.  Fully half of all American recipients of Nobel prizes in physiology and medicine have been trained or funded with NIH’s help.

Approximately 10 percent of NIH expenditures supports the research of about 1,200 scientists working at the NIH Bethesda, Md. campus.  The balance is awarded through almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 212,000 researchers at over 2,800 universities, medical schools and other research institutions in every state and around the world.

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