This research will develop behavioral and dynamic models of economic well-being among older Americans that, for the first time, incorporate labor force participation, employment status over the life course, marital status changes, socioeconomic background characteristics, and geographic context. The 1990 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) (both the response and nonresponse files) will be analyzed. The PSID contains longitudinal data on a wide variety of social, demographic, and economic variables, and will be used to track older individuals as they age. The first objective is to document the differences in income sources and poverty experiences of men and women in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Kaplan-Meier survivor functions for poverty transitions will be estimated and utilized to generate distributions of poverty spells by gender and residence. The second objective is to use pooled person-year records to estimate logistic regression models predicting the likelihood of being poor, paying special attention to the impact of work history, marital status and metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan residence. The third objective is to identify aspects of work history, life course transitions, individual characteristics, and geographic context that influence the rates at which men and women enter and exit poverty. Discrete-time methods will be employed to estimate competing risks event history models with fixed and time-varying covariates. It is hypothesized that metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas have different opportunity structures and employment conditions that, when accumulated over the life course, culminate in nonmetropolitan elderly persons having (1) more and longer spells of poverty; (2) a higher likelihood of being poor at some time during old age; and (3) higher rates of transition into poverty and lower rates of transition out of poverty, when compared with metropolitan elderly men and women. Ultimately, this research will assess the usefulness of a life course perspective that focuses on work history and marital status for understanding the economic well-being of elderly men and women, and will remedy an absence of concern in the literature for the effects of geographic context in shaping economic prospects in old age. It provides an opportunity to determine whether life course experiences alone are enough to explain differences in well-being, or whether life experiences must be placed within a geographic context to full understand to processes and conditions that place elderly men and women at risk of being poor. GRANT-R01AI34154 Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a ubiquitous pathogen that causes severe complications in immune-suppressed or -compromised individuals. Particularly affected among the adult population are AIDS patients as well as patients undergoing immune-suppressive therapy after organ transplantation. In addition, HCMV can cross the placenta and infect the fetus in utero leading to congenital defects. HCMV gene expression is characterized by three phases, immediate early (IE), early and late. After the IE phase of gene expression, numerous early genes are expressed in preparation for viral DNA replication. The early genes are a complex class of genes that 1) differ in their kinetic appearance within the early phase and 2) are expressed at varying abundance at early and late times. Late gene expression is characterized by a continuation of the expression of early genes that are differentially regulated at late times after infection and true late genes that are expressed only after the onset of viral DNA replication. The regulation of viral early and late promoters is being actively examined by several research groups. Sequences that regulate these promoters in cis have been identified. However, studies to date have been performed in transient assays which exclude the influence of the viral genome in regulating early and late gene expression. In these studies, we propose to assess three previously characterized HCMV promoters, pol, pp65 and pp28, by analyzing those cis-acting sequences responsible for regulating gene expression in the context of the viral genome. This will be accomplished by way of the following specific aims: 1) Generation of recombinant virus expressing promoter-reporter gene constructs. 2) Analysis of the kinetics of reporter gene expression at early and late times after infection and comparison to the endogenous gene. 3) Assessment of cis-acting sequences that regulate early promoters. 4) Comparative assessment of the early-late transition by analyzing early and late promoters in the presence and absence of viral DNA replication.
| McLaughlin, D K; Jensen, L (2000) Work history and U.S. elders' transitions into poverty. Gerontologist 40:469-79 |
| McLaughlin, D K (1998) Rural women's economic realities. J Women Aging 10:41-65 |
| Jensen, L; McLaughlin, D K (1997) The escape from poverty among rural and urban elders. Gerontologist 37:462-8 |
