There was a time when most people who underwent appendectomy surgery could expect to stay in the hospital for a week and not fully recover for up to a month, often experiencing pain along the way.
Today, thanks to research that led to the development of laparoscopic or “keyhole” surgery, recovery is typically much faster with patients returning to normal life inside a few weeks. In fact, same-day discharge after laparoscopic appendectomy is safe and somewhat commonplace in uncomplicated cases, with low rates of readmission.
That’s one example of how medical research is helping improve and even save the lives of people everywhere. It’s the kind of research that usually would not take place without federal grants to eventually move new diagnostics, devices, drugs, and cures out of the laboratory and into the public domain.
The prospect of less federal funding for such research, most often through the National Institutes of Health, has triggered worries among researchers and medical professionals who have seen human paybacks over time. Not every research path yields results, of course; there are no guarantees of success.
If core funding dries up, however, the main guarantee is that nothing good will happen.
Examples of such research include better treatments for several types of cancer; understanding the role of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that live inside the human body, for better and worse; treatments for inflammatory bowel disease; modeling for rare disease cures; implantable artificial organs and animal-to-human organ transplants, such as kidneys and livers; improved antibiotics; use of artificial intelligence in health care; and new ways to better target drug delivery through nanoparticles.
One promising area of research right now is Alzheimer’s disease, which is becoming a scourge in an aging population. It often robs its victims of basic functions and leaves them dependent on others for care. Alzheimer’s affects 7 million people nationally and about 120,000 in Wisconsin alone today — and the numbers are growing.
Having lost relatives to this disease, I paid close attention at recent events where researchers described their work and how it wouldn’t take place without federal support.
UW-Madison Professor Sterling Johnson leads one of the world’s largest and longest-running studies of people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease. His team aims to diagnose the disease years before people develop symptoms and then identify ways to slow its progression.
“A key problem we are trying to solve is how we can diagnose the disease earlier, before people even develop symptoms,” Johnson said during a campus news conference. “Early diagnosis allows time for individuals and their families to take control of their situation, maintain good quality of life, take steps to protect brain health, and learn about treatments.”
Called the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention, this NIH-funded study began in 2001 and follows more than 1,700 adults, most of whom with a family history of Alzheimer’s.
Another speaker was UW-Milwaukee professor Karyn Frick, who directs a neuroscience-focused program and laboratory on that campus.
“For much of the past 25 years, my research has been driven by the fact that women are at significantly greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease than men, which we think is related to estrogen loss at menopause,” Frick said.
The NIH-funded research conducted in her laboratory is designed to understand how estrogens regulate memory on a cellular and molecular level. The goal is to “use this information to develop new treatments to help reduce memory loss and the risk of Alzheimer’s in women, as well as men,” Frick said.
A major part of the process at UW-Milwaukee and elsewhere is training tomorrow’s scientists to continue the work that may one day lead to treatments and even cures.
“My own NIH-funded research has led to the development of new therapies for reducing memory loss, alleviating hot flashes, and reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease that we hope will reach the clinic within the next five to 10 years,” she said.
Political trends come and go, and there’s always room for disagreement on what’s effective and what is not. However, the long-term record of federal support for research has paid off in dollars and cents as well as human health. It deserves to continue.
