Rectifying Disparities in Funding of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Research by the US National Institutes of Health

Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA/NHPI) is an artificial category for US citizens whose ancestry ranges across the vast continent of Asia, including the world's most populous countries such as China and India, and people descended from indigenous island populations scattered across the world's largest ocean, the Pacific.For example, the distance between Honolulu, Hawaii, and Guam requires 7 hours of air travel, compared with 5 hours of air travel between Washington, DC, and San Francisco, California.The heterogeneity of the AA/NHPI population defies simplistic characterization, as they speak hundreds of languages and dialects in their homes, reflect multiple cultures, and are further differentiated by their degrees of assimilation into mainstream American life.Consequently, while research to elucidate their health challenges should ideally be based on disaggregating AA/NHPI populations, investigators frequently must aggregate their data to derive findings that allow for comparison with other major US racial/ethnic populations.Đoàn et al 1 attempt to determine the level of investment by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund clinical research focused on AA/NHPI participants for fiscal years 1992 to 2018.Their findings were that the overall funding amounted to less than 0.2% of the NIH budget for 529 projects.These projects consisted of those that either addressed exclusively AA/NHPI individuals or AA/NHPI individuals with participants of other races and ethnicities.These findings are important and reflect both good news and bad news.