Identifying and pursuing research priorities at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

As part of its planning process, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), a component of the National Institutes of Health, periodically evaluates how well it applies its criteria for setting research priorities. For its most recent evaluation, NCCAM compared funding levels in fiscal years 2000 and 2003 for 18 diseases with a substantial public health burden including Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, back pain, cancer, diabetes, coronary heart disease, HIV/AIDS, migraine, and stroke, with 7 measures of disease burden: 1) prevalence, 2) mortality, 3) years of life lost (YLL), 4) years lost to disability (YLD), 5) disability-adjusted life years (DALY's), 6) direct costs of illness (COI), and 7) total COI. There is an increasing relationship between NCCAM research funding and disease burden over the 4-year study period that reflects funding of specific research initiatives. The strength of the individual correlations varied among measures, with the strongest correlations seen with total COI and the weakest seen with mortality. When applied with its other criteria, measures of disease burden aid identification and matching of NCCAM priorities with levels of support.