Does owning a pet protect older people against loneliness?
Reported loneliness is dependent on socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, household income, household living arrangements and health status. Taking those factors into account, owning a pet significantly influences later reporting of loneliness in women in our longitudinal analysis. In the reverse direction, reported loneliness influences pet ownership in later waves. In both directions, the relatively strong gender interaction suggests the association is limited to women with effects for men minimal or non-existent.
Our study indicates a low degree of expression profile variability within gastric tumor samples isolated from one patient. These data suggest that tumor tissue heterogeneity is not a dominant source of error for microarray analysis of larger tumor samples, making total RNA extraction an appropriate strategy for performing gene chip expression profiling of gastric cancer.