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Better public health research needed in IndiaResearch papers and reports have increased over the past decade, but major gaps remain in addressing disease burden and health system priorities October 14, 2009–Public health research in India, while having grown in the past decade, continues to be inadequate in scope and quality considering the country’s daunting disease burden, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. A team of researchers, headed up by Dr. Lalit Dandona of both IHME and the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), found that the overall number of original health research publications from India in the US National Library of Medicine’s database, known as PubMed, doubled from 4,494 in 2002 to 9,066 in 2007. However, only a small subset of those papers focused on public health. Though the number of public health papers tripled in that same period, they still comprised only 5% of the total papers in 2007. Several major causes of disease burden in India continued to be underrepresented in the quality-adjusted public health research output in 2007, according to the study. There were no papers on evaluation of population health interventions for the leading noncommunicable diseases in India, such as cardiovascular disease, major depression, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Researchers studied the research output from India in the form of published papers and unpublished research reports available in the public domain. The work was done in collaboration with scientists at PHFI, the University of Sydney, and the George Institute for International Health in India. Their paper, “Trends of public health research output from India 2001-2008,” was published in the journal BMC Medicine in October 2009 and provides the most up-to-date analysis of public health research output from India. Of the public health research reports produced from 2001 to 2008, the largest proportion focused on reproductive and child health and HIV/AIDS. Leading noncommunicable causes of disease burden and road traffic injuries were grossly underrepresented in these reports, as were some critical components of the health system such as health information. The researchers found that the scientific quality of the reports was higher when Indian researchers collaborated with international researchers or organizations, as compared with reports produced solely by Indian researchers or by international organizations. While about 30% of the reports were evaluations, this proportion was two times higher among reports produced by international organizations as compared to Indian organizations. Researchers suggest policymakers in India focus their attention on filling the ongoing gaps in public health research to make it consistent with disease burden trends and health system priorities. Read the article: Dandona L, Raban MZ, Guggilla RK, Bhatnagar A, Dandona R. Trends of the public health research output from India during 2001-2008. BMC Medicine October 14, 2009; 7:59 doi: 10.1186/1741-7015-7-59. |
