FY09 L-HHS Appropriations Report Language

Senate:

Headache Disorders. – The Committee encourages intensified efforts to understand the causes, prevention, treatment, and eventual cure of headache disorders, including migraine, cluster headache, and chronic daily headache. Research on these disorders, to date, has not received funding commensurate with their prevalence or their costs to the economy. Therefore, the Committee strongly urges the NINDS to solicit grant applications in this area; encourage new investigators with career training and transition awards; provide fair peer review by headache scientists of submitted headache research grant applications; and collaborate with the research community to develop “Headache Disorders Research Benchmarks.”

House:

Headache Disorders. – The Committee encourages intensified efforts by NINDS to produce breakthroughs in understanding the causes, prevention, treatment, and eventual cure of headache disorders, including migraine, cluster headache, and chronic daily headache. The Committee encourages NINDS to increase its research effort in headache disorders with requests for application and career training and transition awards; and taking any other steps to ensure that vigorous intramural and extramural headache research programs are established. To identify consensus research targets; the committee further encourages NINDS to collaborate with the national and international research community to develop Headache Disorders Research Benchmarks, similar to the Epilepsy Research Benchmarks initiative. To improve the transparency of NIH research funding allocations, the Committee suggests that “migraine” and “headache disorders” be included as individual categories in the annual NIH estimates of funding for various disease areas, as well as in the forthcoming Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization program.


FY10 L-HHS Appropriations Report Language

Senate:

Headache Disorders, - The Committee notes that NIH-funded research efforts on headache disorders have not been commensurate with their enormous disease burden. The Committee strongly urges the NINDS to solicit grant applications for fundamental and translational research on headache disorders and to recruit new investigators to the field. The Committee also urges the establishment of a screening program for therapies for headache disorders comparable in scope to the Anticonvulsant Screening Program [ASP]. The Center for Scientific Review is encouraged to provide fair peer review by ensuring that applications submitted in the area of headache research will be considered by study sections that include members who are principally headache research scientists. The Committee commends the NINDS for recently initiating a process towards defining headache disorders research benchmarks and requests an update on the progress of this program in the fiscal year 2011 congressional budget justification. The Committee also requests an update on the status of NIH intramural research programs related to headache disorders.

House:

Headache Disorders.--The Committee urges NINDS to: (1) solicit grant applications for fundamental and translational research on headache disorders with Requests for Applications, and (2) recruit new investigators with career training and transition awards. The Committee encourages NINDS to establish a screening program for therapies for headache disorders comparable in scope to the Anticonvulsant Screening Program. The Committee commends NINDS for recently initiating a process towards defining Headache Disorders Research Benchmarks and requests a report to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate on the progress of this program by December 1, 2009.
 

Last updated February 1, 2013.