What Makes Retirees Happier: A Gradual or 'Cold Turkey' Retirement?

This study explores the factors that affect an individual’s happiness while transitioning into retirement. Recent studies highlight gradual retirement as an attractive option to older workers as they approach full retirement. However, it is not clear whether phasing or cold turkey makes for a happier retirement. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, this study explores what shapes the change in happiness between the last wave of full employment and the first wave of full retirement. Results suggest that what really matters is not the type of transition (gradual retirement or cold turkey), but whether people perceive the transition as chosen or forced

Simultaneous Quantitation of Antibodies to Neutralizing Epitopes on Virus-Like Particles for Human Papillomavirus Types 6, 11, 16, and 18 by a Multiplexed Luminex Assay

Several different methods have been developed to quantitate neutralizing antibody responses to human papillomaviruses (HPVs), including in vivo neutralization assays, in vitro pseudoneutralization assays, competitive radioimmunoassays (cRIAs), and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. However, each of these techniques possesses one or more limitations that preclude testing large numbers of patient sera for use in natural history studies and large vaccine clinical trials. We describe here a new multiplexed assay, by using the Luminex Laboratory MultiAnalyte Profiling (LabMAP3) assay system, that can simultaneously quantitate neutralizing antibodies to human papillomavirus types 6, 11, 16, and 18 in 50 μl of serum. The HPV-Luminex competitive immunoassay measures titers of polyclonal antibodies in serum capable of displacing phycoerythrin-labeled detection monoclonal antibodies binding to conformationally sensitive, neutralizing epitopes on the respective virus-like particles. This competitive Luminex immunoassay was found to be as sensitive, accurate, and precise as the currently used cRIAs. An effective HPV vaccine will most likely require several distinct genotypes to protect against multiple cancer causing papillomaviruses. The HPV-Luminex immunoassay should prove to be a useful tool in simultaneously quantitating antibody immune responses to multiple HPV genotypes for natural history infection studies and for monitoring the efficacy of prospective vaccines