Decades-Long NHS Research Jeopardized by Funding Cuts

The Nurses’ Health Study – a 48-year long medical study run jointly by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Harvard Medical School – is at risk of shutting down due to a lack of funding, according to researchers involved with the project.

The NHS is one of the largest studies of women’s risk factors for major chronic diseases. Initially designed to study the long-term impacts of contraceptives, smoking, cancer, and heart disease, the NHS has now expanded to study more than thirty diseases across its over 280,000 participants.

“We published almost 4,000 papers on almost every important issue in women’s health,” said Walter C. Willett, principal investigator of the NHS II, the study’s second generation cohort.

The NHS has received continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health since its founding in 1976. The National Cancer Institute — a constituent member of the NIH — decided in June to stop funding cancer epidemiology cohort studies like the NHS.

According to Willett, this decision will put the NHS’s research in jeopardy, after what remains of its NCI grant runs out after this year.

The NHS’s second and third generation cohorts — NHS II and NHS 3 — have enough funding to sustain themselves for the next couple of years, according to Jorge E. Chavarro, principal investigator of the NHS 3.

“One of the biggest problems is that the NIH hasn’t really updated its budget in a while,” Chavarro said. “In 30 years, people have really lost about 50 percent of their budget in real dollars. Once you take into account inflation, we’re operating with 1990s budgets at 2020s prices.”

The NCI and NIH did not respond to a request for comment on the funding reduction.

Willett said that the NCI’s reasons for its decision are “quite unclear to me.”

“Everybody says they don’t make any sense,” Willett added.

While the NCI is starting its own cohort study, Willett said that its ability to attain “repeated measurements” akin to those of the NHS remains unclear, and that it would take “decades” for the NCI’s research to “pay off in the same way.”

According to Willett, the NHS is looking to cut costs and receive funding from other educational and private institutions.

“It’s going to be very challenging to try to piece together the funding and the continuity that’s critical for this kind of study,” he added.

Chavarro said that the NHS 3 team has prepared for funding cuts.

“Ever since we started, we knew that we were in a climate of increasing financial pressure,” he said. “We've designed the underlying logistics of the study to be able to strain, to be able to grow and shrink based on specific needs.”

Chavarro added that even with the funding reduction, the researchers have decades worth of data and specimens that they can use in their continued study.

“What we need to be doing right now is rethinking about how our logistic and administrative structures can be reimagined,” Chavarro said. “We’re essentially preparing for the skinny, ugly cows season.”