Construction of the Earnings and Benefits File (EBF) for Use With the Health and Retirement Survey

Analysts using the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) often require information on earnings, labor market attachment, and social security benefits in order to better understand the factors affecting retirement and well-being at older ages. To this end, several derived variables were constructed and documented in the Earnings and Benefits File (EBF) described here. The EBF provides a set of summary earnings, employment, and social security wealth measures for a subset of HRS respondents in Wave 1 of the survey, for whom administrative records are available. The EBF, a restricted data file, is available from the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research for matching only with versions of the HRS containing geographic detail no finer than the Census Division level. Interested users should contact [email protected] by email for further information on access to the data.

The Exercise Component of Cardiac Rehabilitation

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among all persons in the United States today. Many other people suffer from heart problems or conditions and are fortunate enough to survive. For those who do have nonfatal initial heart problems and complications, exercise will be a significant part of their follow up comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation program. The cardiac rehabilitation program is determined by many medical professionals all of whom carry various responsibilities and participate in particular stages of a patient\u27s overall program. The physical therapist is a member of the cardiac rehabilitation team and is generally in charge of the exercise portion of the program. The purpose of this independent study is to explore the role of exercise, its importance, its prescription, and its implementation into the patient\u27s comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation program. The information in this independent study will provide guidelines for the entry level or cardiac rehabilitation inexperienced physical therapist to better understand the scope and utilization of exercise as a component of comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation

Cuba and its good neighbor: A microcosm of changing United States policy toward Latin America

The emphais of this study is upon the dichotomy created by the United States trying earnestly to promost the Good Neighbor policy while at the same time exhibiting an unwillingness to allow complete self-determination by promoting a stable and conservative government. The study proceeds only through 1934 because, by that time, although the Good Neighbor policy continued, it had had its effect upon the Republic of Cuba and the relationships between the two countries had been established in a pattern which would continue until the Castro revolution. In addition, after 1934 there is a void in the amount of primary source material available

Gene Expression in Experimental Aortic Coarctation and Repair: Candidate Genes for Therapeutic Intervention?

Coarctation of the aorta (CoA) is a constriction of the proximal descending thoracic aorta and is one of the most common congenital cardiovascular defects. Treatments for CoA improve life expectancy, but morbidity persists, particularly due to the development of chronic hypertension (HTN). Identifying the mechanisms of morbidity is difficult in humans due to confounding variables such as age at repair, follow-up duration, coarctation severity and concurrent anomalies. We previously developed an experimental model that replicates aortic pathology in humans with CoA without these confounding variables, and mimics correction at various times using dissolvable suture. Here we present the most comprehensive description of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) to date from the pathology of CoA, which were obtained using this model. Aortic samples (n=4/group) from the ascending aorta that experiences elevated blood pressure (BP) from induction of CoA, and restoration of normal BP after its correction, were analyzed by gene expression microarray, and enriched genes were converted to human orthologues. 51 DEGs with \u3e6 fold-change (FC) were used to determine enriched Gene Ontology terms, altered pathways, and association with National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headers (MeSH) IDs for HTN, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and CoA. The results generated 18 pathways, 4 of which (cell cycle, immune system, hemostasis and metabolism) were shared with MeSH ID’s for HTN and CVD, and individual genes were associated with the CoA MeSH ID. A thorough literature search further uncovered association with contractile, cytoskeletal and regulatory proteins related to excitation-contraction coupling and metabolism that may explain the structural and functional changes observed in our experimental model, and ultimately help to unravel the mechanisms responsible for persistent morbidity after treatment for CoA

Off-Road Vehicle Recreation in the West: Implications of a Wyoming Analysis

Community/Rural/Urban Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Construction of the Earnings and Benefits File (EBF) for Use With the Health and Retirement Survey

This paper documents the Earnings and Benefits File (EBF). The EBF is a restricted dataset created for researchers working with the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) under a set of limited access conditions. The EBF and all derived variables contained therein are intended for research purposes only, by registered users of the public use file of the Health and Retirement Survey, and may be linked only with HRS files containing no geographic detail below the Census Division level. Details on the rationale for, and definitions of, constructed employment, earnings, and social security wealth variables in the EBF are provided, as well as a bibliography for those wishing additional information on the rules by which social security earnings data are used in calculating benefits. The EBF contains information derived for respondents of the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey who authorized the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research to obtain administrative records from the Social Security Administration. The EBF is described below, first in conceptual terms in Part I, and then in more technical detail in Part II. Appendices contain a detailed layout of variables and codebook for the data file along with additional descriptive statistics