NIH grants show drop in diversity focus

Hello Health Rounds readers! Below in our last newsletter until 2026, we highlight a study showing that grants funded this year by the U.S. National Institutes of Health were less likely to mention ethnic, racial and gender considerations, compared to grants funded last year. We also share findings that help explain how dogs improve their humans' mental health.

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An analysis of language used in grants awarded this year by the U.S. National Institutes of Health suggests that researchers are less likely now than previously to consider study participants' ethnic, racial and gender diversity – or less likely to admit in writing that they plan to do so.

The change is likely due to executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion-related funding and requiring agencies to "terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all . . . 'equity-related' grants or contracts," the researchers said.

Indeed, medical researchers not involved in the new study told Reuters earlier this year that they have been self-censoring their use of equity, diversity and inclusion language to increase their odds of receiving grants. Others have said they were instructed by NIH officials to strike such language from their applications.

To evaluate the issue, researchers at Harvard Medical School analyzed the abstracts, or summaries, of 17,701 grants awarded by the NIH in 2024 and 2025.

The rate of words reflecting diversity language – such as "Native American," "gender," "ethnicity," and "sexual orientation" - decreased 25% between January 2024 and June 2025, the researchers reported in The BMJ.

Analyzing 1,967 pairs of the same grants in 2024 and 2025, in order to examine changes in language within the same research project, they found that words reflecting diversity language were deleted from grant abstracts at a 10-fold higher rate than other words in 2025.

The findings are "consistent with anecdotal evidence that researchers have modified language to prevent grant abstracts from being flagged for governmental review, suggesting a limitation on researchers' ability to freely use specific terms in federal research grants," the researchers said.

Dogs' beneficial effects on their humans' mental health may be partly due to sharing of microscopic organisms, a new study suggests.

Living with dogs prompts increases in microbes in and on their humans' bodies that are associated with mental health, researchers reported in iScience.

The same team of researchers had found in previous studies that people who grow up with a dog from a young age and continue to have dogs later in life score higher on measures of companionship and social support.

Other studies have shown that dog owners have differences in the populations of beneficial microscopic organisms that live in their intestines – the so-called gut microbiome - compared to non-dog owners.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed oral microbiome samples collected from 13-year-olds with and without dogs at home. They found similar species diversity and richness between the two groups. But the microbiome composition showed differences, suggesting that owning a dog shifted the abundances of specific oral bacteria.

When the researchers treated laboratory mice with microbiota from dog-owning teens to see whether and how it affected their social behavior, they found mice with the dog-owning microbiome spent more time sniffing their cage mates and showed more "prosocial behavior."

"The most interesting finding from this study is that bacteria promoting prosociality, or empathy, were discovered in the microbiomes of adolescent children who keep dogs," study leader Takefumi Kikusui of Azabu University in Japan said in a statement.

The studies authors say that while more research is needed, the results suggest that a family dog can change the microbiome in ways that support mental health, empathy, and prosocial behavior.

This newsletter was edited by Aurora Ellis; additional reporting by Shawana Alleyne-Morris.

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