By Eve Herold – Healthspan Action Coalition –
The Healthspan Action Coalition has called upon Congress to include healthspan considerations in every grant application to the National Institutes of Health. Responding to a call for comments from the House Energy and Commerce Committee on a proposed framework for reorganization of the NIH, which included replacing the National Institute on Aging with a new National Institute on Dementia. HSAC emphasized that there is much more to aging than neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s. The stated goal of the framework is to streamline the NIH by reducing redundancies and the formation of research silos. It recommends cutting the number of Institutes and Centers from 27 to 15, and establishing a “holistic life stage perspective” in biomedical research. In keeping with this goal, we called for explicit consideration in every grant application of how the proposed research would impact the healthspan, the establishment of collaborative regional research clusters to study the interrelated layers of healthspan science, plus recommendations for how AI could make the NIH more efficient. This is only a glimpse of the HSAC response; for details, peruse the summary of our letter and the complete letter on our website.
