The art and science of anti-aging therapies

A meeting entitled "The Art and Science of Anti-Aging Therapies: Convergence of Theory and Practice" took place on 18 and 19 March 2005 at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The symposium was held for health care professionals, researchers, and consumers to provide them with information about current trends in anti-aging therapies. The program, which combined medical, surgical, and nonpharmacological approaches to healthy successful aging, gave attendees the opportunity to make sense of the issues at hand and to sort out safe treatments from perilous quick fixes.     

Using tribal/State Title IV-E agreements to help American Indian tribes access foster care and adoption funding

Funding under Title IV-E has historically not been available to American Indian communities, therefore, tribes have had to develop agreements with states to access these funds for child care services. This study analyzes Title IV-E intergovernmental provisions to help tribes and states strengthen Title IV-E agreements. A nationwide content analysis of existing Title IV-E documents, phone interviews, and focus groups revealed that Title IV-E tribal/state agreements vary widely, with most tribes not receiving full access to state services. These agreements focus on foster care maintenance payments and services. This article includes recommendations to help facilitate tribal access to Title IV-E funding for foster care and adoption services.     

Psychotherapy Quality Assessment

Abstract

In the first section of this paper, Dr. Whitaker argues that there are both practical and heuristic reasons for developing a systematic method for assessing the quality of psychotherapy in a university mental health service. He maintains that, though the task of psychotherapy quality assessment is a complex undertaking, it is possible to take steps toward its accomplishment in a responsible way while still keeping the task within manageable proportions.

In the second section, Dr. Sarnat describes one in a series of efforts at quality assessment at the Mental Health Division of the University of Massachusetts Health Services. She describes the development of a new method of recordkeeping and record review, and the results of a review of three different samples of records. She concludes that the method is feasible, useful, and meaningful for quality assessment in that setting, although the method is admittedly limited in what it can measure.

In the final section, Dr. Arnstein comments on the above, adding a note of caution about both the feasibility and the wisdom of embarking on a program of quality assessment of psychotherapy. He elaborates some of the difficulties that may prevent one from arriving at a valid assessment.     

CONSTRUCTION OF RESOLVABLE ROW-COLUMN DESIGNS BASED ON CONTRACTIONS

This paper defines the contraction of a resolvable row‐column design for more than two replicates. It shows that the (M,S)‐optimality criterion for the row‐column designs can be expressed simply in terms of the elements of the row and column incidence matrices of the contraction. This allows the development of a very fast algorithm to construct optimal or near‐optimal resolvable row‐column designs. The performance of such an algorithm is compared with an existing algorithm.