<p><strong>Objective</strong>: Development of a new framework for the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to assess progress and opportunities toward stimulating and supporting rigorous research to address health disparities.</p><p><strong>Design:</strong> Portfolio review of NIA’s health disparities research portfolio to evaluate NIA’s progress in addressing priority health<br />disparities areas.<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Results:</strong> The NIA Health DisparitiesResearch Framework highlights important factors for health disparities research related to aging, provides an organizing structure for tracking progress, stimulates opportunities to better delineate causal pathways and broadens the scope for malleable targets for intervention, aiding in our efforts to address health disparities in the aging population.<br /><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Conclusions:</strong> The promise of health disparitiesresearch depends largely on scientific rigor that builds on past findings and aggressively pursues new approaches. The NIA Health Disparities Framework provides a landscape for stimulating interdisciplinary<br />approaches, evaluating research productivity and identifying opportunities for innovative health disparities research related to<br />aging. <em>Ethn Dis.</em> 2015;25(3):245-254.</p>

Background Incorporating faith (religious or spiritual) perspectives into psychological treatments has attracted significant interest in recent years. However, previous suggestion that good psychiatric care should include spiritual components has provoked controversy. To try to address ongoing uncertainty in this field we present a systematic review and metaanalysis to assess the efficacy of faith-based adaptations of bona fide psychological therapies for depression or anxiety.

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For decades, the artificial glaciers in Ladakh, North India, have been trumpeted as useful water-harvesting devices for subsistence farming communities. In this context, the massive masonry structures link low-tech, vernacular hydrological thinking with design innovation to create a popular climate-adaptive design solution. While these interventions appear to provide promising new strategies for water harvesting in this dry desert region, very little data exist to substantiate, quantify, or contradict the project claims. This paper interrogates these structures through the lens of the design disciplines and considers the functional aspects of a prototypical artificial glacier system. Six different artificial glacier systems were studied over a period of two summer months, revealing a variety of design and construction approaches. These findings give rise to a number of engineering patterns that may be found in an archetypical artificial glacier system.

Aging water infrastructure and increased water scarcity have resulted in higher interest in water reuse and decentralization. Rating systems for high-performance buildings implicitly promote the use of building-scale, decentralized water supply and treatment technologies. It is important to recognize the potential benefits and trade-offs of decentralized and centralized water systems in the context of high-performance buildings. For this reason and to fill a gap in the current literature, we completed a life cycle assessment (LCA) of the decentralized water system of a high-performance, net-zero energy, net-zero water building (NZB) that received multiple green building certifications and compared the results with two modeled buildings (conventional and water efficient) using centralized water systems. We investigated the NZB's impacts over varying lifetimes, conducted a break-even analysis, and included Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis. The results show that, although the NZB performs better in most categories than the conventional building, the water efficient building generally outperforms the NZB. The lifetime of the NZB, septic tank aeration, and use of solar energy have been found to be important factors in the NZB's impacts. While these findings are specific to the case study building, location, and treatment technologies, the framework for comparison of water and wastewater impacts of various buildings can be applied during building design to aid decision making. As we design and operate high-performance buildings, the potential trade-offs of advanced decentralized water treatment systems should be considered.

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