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Investing in women's health research on RA yields benefits beyond investing in general research

• The return on investment is higher for scenarios in which research funding has three times the impact on women's health outcomes than on men's health outcomes. Assuming an equal impact of research on women and men results in lower returns.

Large returns result from very small health improvements

• Assuming 0.1 percent or less total health improvement from reduced age incidence of RA and reduced disease severity, more than 70,000 years with RA can be saved over 30 years in the United States, with substantial gains in health-related quality of life.
• The return on investment is 174,000 percent for doubled investment in women's health research with an assumption of only 0.1 percent improvement in health outcomes.

Women's health has suffered from insufficient research addressing women. The research community has not widely embraced the value of this research, and the impact of limited knowledge about women's health relative to men's is far-reaching. Without information on the potential return on investment for women's health research, research funders, policymakers, and business leaders lack a basis for altering research investments to improve knowledge of women's health.

As part of an initiative of the Women's Health Access Matters (WHAM) nonprofit foundation, RAND Corporation researchers examined the impact of increasing funding for women's health research on rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA was chosen partly because of its higher prevalence in women than men, with some symptom profiles differing by sex. In this report, the authors present the results of microsimulation models used to explore the potential for enhanced investment in women's health research, in terms of the economic well-being of women and for the U.S. population.

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