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      Toward the Assessment of Scientific and Public Health Impacts of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Extramural Asthma Research Program Using Available Data

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          Abstract

          Background

          In the past 15 years, asthma prevalence has increased and is disproportionately distributed among children, minorities, and low-income persons. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Division of Extramural Research and Training developed a framework to measure the scientific and health impacts of its extramural asthma research to improve the scientific basis for reducing the health effects of asthma.

          Objectives

          Here we apply the framework to characterize the NIEHS asthma portfolio’s impact in terms of publications, clinical applications of findings, community interventions, and technology developments.

          Methods

          A logic model was tailored to inputs, outputs, and outcomes of the NIEHS asthma portfolio. Data from existing National Institutes of Health (NIH) databases are used, along with publicly available bibliometric data and structured elicitation of expert judgment.

          Results

          NIEHS is the third largest source of asthma-related research grant funding within the NIH between 1975 and 2005, after the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Much of NIEHS-funded asthma research focuses on basic research, but results are often published in journals focused on clinical investigation, increasing the likelihood that the work is moved into practice along the “bench to bedside” continuum. NIEHS support has led to key breakthroughs in scientific research concerning susceptibility to asthma, environmental conditions that heighten asthma symptoms, and cellular mechanisms that may be involved in treating asthma.

          Conclusions

          If gaps and limitations in publicly available data receive adequate attention, further linkages can be demonstrated between research activities and public health improvements. This logic model approach to research impact assessment demonstrates that it is possible to conceptualize program components, mine existing databases, and begin to show longer-term impacts of program results. The next challenges will be to modify current data structures, improve the linkages among relevant databases, incorporate as much electronically available data as possible, and determine how to improve the quality and health impact of the science that we support.

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          Most cited references10

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          Medicine. The NIH Roadmap.

          E Zerhouni (2003)
          The NIH Roadmap is a set of bold initiatives aimed at accelerating medical research. These initiatives will address challenges that no single NIH institute could tackle alone, but the agency as a whole must undertake. The Roadmap identifies the most compelling opportunities in three arenas: new pathways to discovery, research teams of the future, and reengineering the clinical research enterprise.
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            Asthma genetics 2006: the long and winding road to gene discovery.

            Asthma and atopy are complex phenotypes that are influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. A review of nearly 500 papers on disease association studies identified 25 genes that have been associated with an asthma or atopy phenotype in six or more populations. An additional 54 genes have been associated in 2-5 populations. Here, we discuss the methods that have been used to identify susceptibility genes for common diseases and overview the status of asthma genetic research. Finally, current challenges and future directions are discussed.
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              Describing the impact of health research: a Research Impact Framework

              Background Researchers are increasingly required to describe the impact of their work, e.g. in grant proposals, project reports, press releases and research assessment exercises. Specialised impact assessment studies can be difficult to replicate and may require resources and skills not available to individual researchers. Researchers are often hard-pressed to identify and describe research impacts and ad hoc accounts do not facilitate comparison across time or projects. Methods The Research Impact Framework was developed by identifying potential areas of health research impact from the research impact assessment literature and based on research assessment criteria, for example, as set out by the UK Research Assessment Exercise panels. A prototype of the framework was used to guide an analysis of the impact of selected research projects at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Additional areas of impact were identified in the process and researchers also provided feedback on which descriptive categories they thought were useful and valid vis-à-vis the nature and impact of their work. Results We identified four broad areas of impact: I. Research-related impacts; II. Policy impacts; III. Service impacts: health and intersectoral and IV. Societal impacts. Within each of these areas, further descriptive categories were identified. For example, the nature of research impact on policy can be described using the following categorisation, put forward by Weiss: Instrumental use where research findings drive policy-making; Mobilisation of support where research provides support for policy proposals; Conceptual use where research influences the concepts and language of policy deliberations and Redefining/wider influence where research leads to rethinking and changing established practices and beliefs. Conclusion Researchers, while initially sceptical, found that the Research Impact Framework provided prompts and descriptive categories that helped them systematically identify a range of specific and verifiable impacts related to their work (compared to ad hoc approaches they had previously used). The framework could also help researchers think through implementation strategies and identify unintended or harmful effects. The standardised structure of the framework facilitates comparison of research impacts across projects and time, which is useful from analytical, management and assessment perspectives.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Environ Health Perspect
                Environmental Health Perspectives
                National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
                0091-6765
                1552-9924
                July 2009
                24 March 2009
                : 117
                : 7
                : 1147-1154
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Battelle Health and Life Sciences, Seattle, Washington, USA
                [2 ] Division of Extramural Research and Training, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA
                [3 ] University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
                Author notes
                Address correspondence to E. Liebow, Battelle Health and Life Sciences, 1100 Dexter Ave. North, Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98109 USA. Telephone: (206) 528-3155. Fax: (614) 458-6683. E-mail: liebowe@ 123456battelle.org

                The authors declare they have no competing financial interests.

                Article
                ehp-117-1147
                10.1289/ehp.0800476
                2717143
                19654926
                bf116b32-b9b0-47c4-afe4-38bb04044cda
                This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original DOI.
                History
                : 11 December 2008
                : 24 March 2009
                Categories
                Research

                Public health
                evaluation methodology,children,asthma,pulmonary organ systems/disease processes,minorities,health impact analysis,susceptible populations,policy

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