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Large societal gains may be possible from small health improvements associated with increasing investment in women's health research on AD/ADRD

• Investing in women's health research on AD/ADRD yields benefits beyond investing in general research.

Large returns result from very small health improvements associated with investment in women's health research

• Assuming 0.01 percent improvement in health from small reductions in age incidence and AD/ADRD disease severity, more than 6,000 years with AD/ADRD can be saved across 30 years, with substantial gains in health-related quality of life; nursing home costs could drop by more than $360 million; and the return on investment is 224 percent for doubling investment in women's health research.

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, beginning with a focus on Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's disease–related dementias (AD/ADRD), which result in substantial illness burden, health care costs, caregiving burden, and mortality. 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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