Addressing the Challenges of Palliative Care for Homeless Veterans.

Background: Veterans who nearing the end of life (EOL) in unstable housing are not adequately served by current palliative care or homeless programs.

Methods: Multidisciplinary focus groups, interviews with community and Veterans Affairs (VA) leaders and with 29 homeless veterans were conducted in five cities. A forum of national palliative and homelessness care leaders (n=5) and representatives from each focus group (n=10), then convened.

Using Individual Experiences With Experimental Medications to Predict Medication-Taking Behavior Postauthorization: A DIA Study Endpoints Workstream.

From humanistic, clinical, and economic perspectives, it is important to understand patients' health care attitudes and behavior. Of particular interest in defining the value of a pharmacologic therapy is medication adherence. A DIA workstream was convened to define medication adherence in a drug-development context, explore the relevance of medication nonadherence from various stakeholder perspectives, examine methods of collecting medication adherence data in, or alongside, drug-development programs, and propose a robust approach to predicting medication adherence in routine clinical practice from data derived in, or alongside, drug-development programs.

Women and Lung Disease. Sex Differences and Global Health Disparities.

There is growing evidence that a number of pulmonary diseases affect women differently and with a greater degree of severity than men. The causes for such sex disparity is the focus of this Blue Conference Perspective review, which explores basic cellular and molecular mechanisms, life stages, and clinical outcomes based on environmental, sociocultural, occupational, and infectious scenarios, as well as medical health beliefs. Owing to the breadth of issues related to women and lung disease, we present examples of both basic and clinical concepts that may be the cause for pulmonary disease disparity in women.