The Clippers' pace is far different when Paul is at the point

In this picture from TV’s “Entertainment Tonight,” host George Clooney is all smiles as he welcomes President Obama to his Studio City, Calif., home at a celebrity-packed soiree this week that raised a record-breaking $15 million. Among others, Barbara Streisand, Salma Hayek louis vuitton sunglasses 2012 and Jack Black attended the event, ponying up $40,000 each for the party under a tent set up on Clooney’s backyard basketball court. But after a night of rubbing elbows with the stars, Obama woke up yesterday and traded elbows with Batman and Spider-Man on a public basketball court in LA. Entertainment Tonight Obama invited Clooney, star of a “Batman” flick, and Tobey Maguire, who starred in “Spider-Man,” to play a game of hoops, along with actor Don Cheadle and a few staffers. “Of course George and I won,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s shouted question after the game. “But we’re all winners because nobody got hurt.” Cheadle tweeted his own endorsement of the president: “Hail to the Chief’s jumper.” Mitt Romney topped President Obama in a new poll conducted in part before Obama this week came out in support of gay marriage. Many interested parties pondered exactly how injured Chris Paul was Friday, eyeballing the All-Star guard's every movement to see if a sprained hip was enough to slow down a player Memphis defenders had yet to control. When it turned out that Paul — yes, Chris Paul designer louis vuitton shoes for men black 2012 hot sale cheapest — was human and that he wouldn't be his usual dominant, unstoppable, clutch self, it meant another Clipper suddenly had some impossibly large sneakers to fill. Eric Bledsoe wasn't sure before the game if he would get that chance against Memphis in Game 6 at Staples Center. But Bledsoe learned in real time, watching Paul move in a much slower fashion because of the injury, that the chance was his. And despite the fact that the Grizzlies won, 90-88, Bledsoe responded with his most inspired performance of the postseason against a team whose entire postseason was at stake. He finished with 14 points, six assists and four rebounds in 24 minutes off the bench, many of them spent keeping the score close when Memphis threatened to pull away. The Grizzlies' victory tied the series at 3-3 and set up a Game 7 on Sunday in Memphis, but Bledsoe got good reviews. Said Paul: "EB was outstanding." Said Coach Vinny Del Negro: "Eric was great." Said DeAndre Jordan: "Even though Chris was a little banged up, Eric definitely stepped up." The question is now how much Bledsoe will have to step up in Game 7. That depends on how healthy Paul's hip will be by then, but regardless, Bledsoe's play will be an X factor in that game. "The momentum, everything he brought to the burberry handbags team, we're going to need that in Memphis," Paul said. Said Jordan: "If Chris isn't ready to go, we totally believe in Eric." Bledsoe is ready for whatever, as usual. "I'm just going to play," he said. "Whatever minutes I get, whatever I don't, I'm just going to play my best." Bledsoe looked exhausted near the end of the game, using his sweat-soaked jersey to wipe the sweat from his brow, with his chest heaving up and down. But he had earned every drop of perspiration after blazing down the court, pushing the tempo, and pressuring the ball on defense. "His all-around effort was big," guard Randy Foye said. The Clippers' pace is far different when Paul is at the point guard versus Bledsoe at that position. "Chris, he picks his spots and he's more of a scorer," Foye said. "Eric, he's more explosive, he's fast, he's strong, he's really fast up and down the floor." But in parts, Bledsoe handled point guard duties while Paul played the shooting guard position, which took some pressure off Paul and allowed Bledsoe to guard Memphis' Mike Conley. "I think it was a good combo," Bledsoe said. That combination might be more prevalent burberry kids sale in Game 7, just as Paul's hip might be feeling better. Bledsoe can't think about that. He can only stay ready.

The consequences of sleep debt are enormous

People who have different sleep patterns on the weekends than they do during the work week may experience "social jet lag," and a new study shows this shift in sleep louis vuitton sunglasses 2012 schedule is linked to obesity. For every hour of social jet lag, the risk of being overweight or obese rises about 33%, says researcher Till Roenneberg, PhD, a professor at the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Munich. Roenneberg, who coined the term, says social jet lag is brought on by the shift in sleep schedule that many people experience on their days off, compared to work days. He estimates that it affects about two-thirds of the population. It goes like this: You don't have to get up for work so you don't bother setting the alarm. That means you get up an hour or two later than you might during the work week. You may also push your bedtime back so you can go out with friends. As a result, many people get more sleep on their days off than they do during the week, and they sleep on a slightly different schedule -- a schedule that is closer to their body's natural rhythms. Roenneberg explains that switching sleep schedules this way feels like changing time zones. "The behavior looks like if most people on a Friday evening fly from Paris to New York or Los Angeles to Tokyo and on Monday they fly back. Since this looks like almost a travel jet lag situation, we called it social jet lag," he says. A key difference between travel jet lag and social jet lag, however, is light. When you arrive in a different place, the sun is coming up and setting at a different time, and your body can reset its own clock to match. With social jet lag, the schedule disruption is chronic because a person stays in the same place. "They have to live a life almost in a different time zone in comparison to their biological clock," Roenneberg says. Roenneberg's previous research shows that social louis vuitton belts jet lag, although not usually as extreme as the sleep disruptions seen in shift workers, can still take a hefty toll on health. "The more social jetlag you have, the more likely it is that you are a smoker; the more alcohol you drink; the higher your caffeine consumption -- you're slightly more depressed than the rest of the population," he says. In his latest study, which is published in Current Biology, Roenneberg and his colleagues mined data from a large database, eventually gathering information on 65,000 people. He measured the average midpoint of a person's sleep on weekdays compared to weekends. The difference in those numbers gave him their social jet lag. For instance, Roenneberg's research shows that most of the population would naturally like to sleep between 1 a.m. and 9 a.m. These are the people most likely to experience social jet lag during the week, when they have to get up early for work. So, a person who goes to bed at 1 a.m. and gets up at 6 a.m. during the work week, for example, would have 1 1/2 hours of social jet lag, based on Roenneberg's formula. Roenneberg then matched these hours of social jet lag to a person's self-reported body mass index (BMI) -- a measure of body size that takes into account height and weight. He found that the more social jet lag a person experienced, the more likely they were to be overweight or obese. Social Jet Lag and Weight Gain So how could sleep that is out of sync with the body's clock potentially lead to weight gain? One way, says Orfeu Buxton, PhD, an assistant burberry handbags outlet professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, is that sleeping against the biological clock is closely linked to not getting enough sleep. "To the extent that sleep duration and timing are up to us, our physiology is tuned to help us get enough," he says in an email to WebMD. "If our sleep is not up to us, we're much less likely to get enough to stay healthy. And whatever it is limiting our sleep may also limit time for exercise or preparing healthy meals." In a recent study, Buxton showed that people like shift workers who have to sleep on short, disrupted schedules burned fewer calories at rest. He estimated that the drop in metabolism could lead to a gain of 10 to 12 pounds in a year's time. So how can you counter the effects of social jet lag? It's not so easy. When asked, Roenneberg said trying to keep your work schedule on weekends might not really help because people keep those kinds of abnormal schedules (getting up at 6 a.m.) because they have to, not because they really want to. Trying to keep the same disrupted schedule on the weekend would just add to a person's sleep debt, which isn't a great solution. "The consequences of sleep debt are enormous," he says. In a perfect world, Roenneberg says, society's whole attitude toward sleep would change. For example, work schedules would be more aligned with the biological clock and start later so that people could go to sleep later. Sleep, he thinks, should get more respect. Still, daylight may help, Roenneberg says. Early risers who feel like they need help falling asleep earlier at night -- so that they can get more sleep -- may be helped burberry belts on sale by getting more sunlight in the morning and avoiding sunlight in the afternoon and evening. People who would like to stay up a little later should try to get more sunlight in the afternoon and evening, he says.

Vaccines are available to protect against human papillomavirus

When researchers, whose findings appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, combined trials of all types of the gut-healthy microbes, they http://www.designerburberyoutlet.com/ found that patients with a range of conditions - from ear infections to sepsis - were 42 percent less likely to get diarrhea from their antibiotic drugs if they were also taking a probiotic. One-quarter to one-third of people treated with an antibiotic typically get diarrhea as a result, the researchers said. It's often not more than an unpleasant side effect, but can be serious enough to send some patients to the hospital. "Antibiotics in doing their work actually kill off a lot of the normal flora that are supposed to exist in our gut, so things kind of go haywire," said Sydne Newberry from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, who worked on the study. Probiotics are strains of bacteria that research suggests can help replace some of the flora that antibiotics, especially so-called broad-spectrum antibiotics, wipe out. "More than likely, what they do is they start to designerburberyoutlet actually restore the normal bacteria in the gut, in the intestines," Newberry said. Probiotics can be bought over-the-counter as capsules, and are also present in some yogurt products. Newberry's team reviewed 63 trials in which researchers had randomly assigned a total of almost 12,000 patients needing antibiotic treatment to probiotics, a placebo pill, or nothing. Newberry and her colleagues calculated that 13 people being treated with antibiotics would need to take a probiotic for one case of diarrhea to be prevented. In a subset of 44 studies in which neither study participants nor the doctors treating them knew who was getting probiotics or placebo, the trials considered least prone to bias, patients on the probiotics were still 39 percent less likely to get diarrhea. The researchers couldn't tell whether one type of probiotic in particular was any better than others, especially since most of the studies used a combination of multiple bacteria strains. The most common probiotics used were from the genus Lactobacillus. Not being able to differentiate the benefits of different strains is a limitation, according to some researchers - because, as with antibiotics, each strain of probiotic can have very different effects. Other experts said that further questions involved the size of the dose and how long it should be given. Most of the studies were small and didn't report louis vuitton shoes on side effects from the probiotics, but those that did concluded that the supplements seemed safe. For that reason, while it's not clear that doctors should be giving out specific probiotics to all of their patients on antibiotic treatment - they may be harmful to small babies or very ill patients - it probably wouldn't hurt to try one, researchers said. One in six cancers - two million a year globally - are caused by largely treatable or preventable infections, new estimates suggest. The Lancet Infectious Diseases review, which looked at incidence rates for 27 cancers in 184 countries, found four main infections are responsible. These four - human papillomaviruses, Helicobacter pylori and hepatitis B and C viruses - account for 1.9m cases of cervical, gut and liver cancers. Most cases are in the developing world. The team from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France says more efforts are needed to tackle these avoidable cases and recognise cancer as a communicable disease. The proportion of cancers related to infection is about three times higher in parts of the developing world, such as east Asia, than in developed countries like the UK - 22.9% versus 7.4%, respectively. Nearly a third of cases occur in people younger than 50 years. Among women, cancer of the cervix accounted for louis vuitton ring about half of the infection-related cancers. In men, more than 80% were liver and gastric cancers. Drs Catherine de Martel and Martyn Plummer, who led the research, said: "Infections with certain viruses, bacteria, and parasites are some of the biggest and preventable causes of cancer worldwide "Application of existing public-health methods for infection prevention, such as vaccination, safer injection practice, or antimicrobial treatments, could have a substantial effect on the future burden of cancer worldwide." Vaccines are available to protect against human papillomavirus (HPV) - which is linked to cancer of the cervix - and hepatitis B virus - an established cause of liver cancer. And experts know that stomach cancer can be avoided by clearing the bacterial infection H. pylori from the gut using a course of antibiotics. Commenting on the work, Dr Goodarz Danaei from Harvard School of Public Medicine in Boston, the US, said: "Since effective and relatively low-cost vaccines for HPV and HBV are available, increasing coverage should be a priority for health systems in high-burden countries." Jessica Harris of Cancer Research UK said: "It's important that authorities worldwide make every effort to reduce the number of infection-related cancers, especially when many of these infections can be prevented. In the UK, infections are thought to be responsible for 3% of cancers, or around 9,700 cases each year. "Vaccination against HPV, which causes cervical Designer louis vuitton women shoes 2012 style outlet black cancer, should go a long way towards reducing rates of this disease in the UK. But it's important that uptake of the vaccination remains high. At a global level, if the vaccine were available in more countries, many thousands more cases could be prevented."

In a conference call with analysts last week

Federal regulators said Monday that an experimental pill being developed by Pfizer to treat rheumatoid arthritis raised “serious safety concerns” and was linked louis vuitton shoes to a higher risk for lymphoma, a form of cancer, and serious infections. Pfizer has identified the drug, known as tofacitinib, as one of the most promising and lucrative prospects in its drug pipeline. The company is struggling to regain lost sales after its best-selling cholesterol drug, Lipitor, lost patent protection last fall. An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to vote on whether to recommend approval of the drug on Wednesday. The agency is then expected to rule on the drug by August. In a statement Monday, the company said the drug’s benefits outweighed its risks, and “we look forward to discussing tofacitinib with the committee http://www.designerburberyoutlet.com/ on Wednesday.” The briefing documents, prepared by F.D.A. staff members and released Monday ahead of the meeting, also found that although tofacitinib did ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and the physical functioning of those who have it, the studies didn’t definitively show that the drug stopped the disease from progressing. “This is particularly important in determining the overall benefit-risk profile of tofacitinib, which is associated with serious safety concerns,” the report found. Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic autoimmune disease that attacks the body’s joints, causing painful swelling and difficulty moving. A handful of biologic drugs, like Humira and Enbrel, exist to treat the disease but they must be injected. Pfizer’s oral pill is to be used in designerburberyoutlet patients who don’t respond to other drugs. In a conference call with analysts last week, a Pfizer executive hinted that questions about safety would probably come up because the drug acted on the body in a new way. “On the risks side, this is a new mechanism of action, so there’ll be lots of interest in understanding the profile thoroughly,” said Geno J. Germano, who is in charge of specialty care and oncology at Pfizer. “The safety events are familiar to rheumatologists. They’re manageable in most cases.” Most of the rheumatoid arthritis drugs on the market carry similar risks, said Dr. John H. Klippel, a rheumatologist and president of the Arthritis Foundation. “People who have that disease, in general, are willing to accept the risk of even serious adverse effects from drugs if they can find drugs that are going to alter the course of the disease,” he said. If tofacitinib is ultimately approved, he said louis vuitton handbags it would represent a “huge advance” because it targets the disease in a new way and will be available as an oral pill. The drug inhibits production of an enzyme implicated in immunological diseases like arthritis. Les Funtleyder, a portfolio manager for Miller Tabak, cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from Monday’s report. “Briefing documents tend to accentuate the risks and it’s not until you get to see the whole panel discuss it that you really hear what people think is important,” said Mr. Funtleyder, whose fund owns Pfizer stock. The fact that the drug did not stop progression of Louis vuitton white sunglasses 2012 new style outlet the disease may not be a serious impediment to getting it approved, he said. If people who use the drug feel better and are able to walk, he added, “does it really matter?”

His immediate boss was so frustrated by him that she called up

He threw away tax documents, got a ticket for trying to pass an ambulance and bought stock in companies that were obviously in trouble. Once a good cook, he burned every sale vuiton pot in the house. He became withdrawn and silent, and no longer spoke to his wife over dinner. That same failure to communicate got him fired from his job at a consulting firm. By 2006, Michael French — a smart, good-natured, hardworking man — had become someone his wife, Ruth, felt she hardly knew. Infuriated, she considered divorce. But in 2007, she found out what was wrong. “I cried,” Mrs. French said. “I can’t tell you how much I cried, and how much I apologized to him for every perceived wrong or misunderstanding.” Mr. French, now 71, has frontotemporal dementia — a little-known, poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed group of brain diseases that eat away at personality and language. Although it was first recognized more than 100 years ago, there is still no cure or treatment, and patients survive an average of only eight years after the diagnosis. But recently, researchers have been making important discoveries about the biochemical and genetic defects that cause some forms of the disease. And for the first time, they have identified drugs that may be able to treat one of those defects, the buildup of abnormal proteins in the brain. Tests in people, the first ever such drug trials in this disease, could begin as soon as early next year at the new lv shoes buy online University of California, San Francisco. “There’s really been an explosion related to the biology,” said Dr. Bruce L. Miller, a professor of neurology and psychiatry there. “I think at least some subtypes of frontotemporal dementia will be the first neurodegenerative diseases we find a cure for.” This disease is different from Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. But it is perhaps even more devastating, because it strikes younger people, progresses faster and, unlike Alzheimer’s, does not attack memory at first but begins with silence, apathy or bizarre personality changes. It is thought to afflict at least 50,000 to 60,000 people in the United States. The scientific findings in frontotemporal dementia may also louis vuitton hair pin reshape thinking about the fundamental flaws involved in Alzheimer’s disease. “I think the way dementia is going in general now is to realize there are many different subtypes,” Dr. Miller said, adding that what is now labeled Alzheimer’s disease may actually turn out to include hundreds of different illnesses. Dementia is a formidable adversary, and the history of efforts to treat Alzheimer’s has to temper any excitement about potential medicines for frontotemporal disease. The drugs for Alzheimer’s have been a disappointment, with just temporary effects on symptoms at best. But even if treatments or cures for frontotemporal dementia do emerge, they will almost certainly come too late for people with advanced cases, like Mr. French or Richard Rainwater, a billionaire investor who learned in 2009 that he had progressive supranuclear palsy, which some http://www.designerburberyoutlet.com/ consider a form of frontotemporal dementia. Mr. Rainwater and his family have donated more than $20 million to a research consortium, but given that he has a rapidly progressive form, any advances from the consortium may be more likely to help others than to save him. Looking for Answers Looking back, Mrs. French, who is 66 and lives in Manhattan, recalled episodes of odd behavior over the years and realized that her husband’s mind had probably begun to slip while he was in his 50s, at least a decade before the disease was diagnosed. He had always changed jobs a lot. At the time she took it as a sign of a stubborn personality, not of illness — and it is still not clear which designerburberyoutlet it was. He always wanted to do things his own way, and that did not sit well with some bosses. “I thought it was just Michael being Michael,” she said. A friend described Mr. French as being unable to read the tea leaves, oblivious of corporate politics. At one point Mrs. French even bought him a self-help book. But he never changed. And he always found another job, better than the one before. But things went downhill in 2006. “His immediate boss was so frustrated by him that she called up, and we were at the dinner table, and I could hear her screaming,” Mrs. French said. He was fired, and this time he did not find another job. At 66, he retired. Soon after, because he had trouble speaking, he consulted a neurologist. When they got the diagnosis, Mrs. French asked the doctor, “How do we treat it?” “It’s brain atrophy,” he replied. Her thoughts of divorce evaporated. Instead, she told her husband: “Whatever happens, we will go through this together. I will be there.” From then on, the silence at the dinner table no longer troubled her. It did not seem personal anymore. He was not refusing to talk; he simply could not. Her anger yellow handbags 2012 melted into sadness. But sometimes she still blew her top. Once, she came home and found him at the stove, seemingly unaware that his oven mitt was smoldering. “I actually hit him a couple times out of frustration,” she said. What made her lose control, she said, was a toxic mix of frustration and fear — fear of what was happening to him, and fear that she would not know what to do, how to help. No amount of information from his doctors could put her at ease.