The Sex Advisors

Risperdal is an atypical antipsychotic drug sued to treat conditions such as schizophrenia. It is also one of the most popular prescribed drugs in America today. Lately, many doctors have also noticed that the drug has been effective in treating other mental conditions such as autism and dementia.

Over the years, many of the people who took Risperdal began to suffer serious side effects. Side effects such as muscle stiffness, tremors, heart irregularities and blood clots became very common. Some patients even suffered strokes. Since then, Risperdal usage has been linked with the death of 37 patients.

Many of the strokes caused by Risperdal occurred in elderly people whose doctor’s prescribed the drug to treat senile dementia. While the drug was not designed to specifically treat this condition, it is still encouraged by many pharmaceutical companies to prescribe Risperdal for this non-approved ‘off label’ usage. This obviously helps boost sales and generate more revenue. In April of 2003, Janssen Pharmaceutica sent out a warning letter informing the public of potential risks regarding the use of the drug on elderly patients.

If you or a loved one has taken Risperdal and have been adversely affected, you may be entitled to compensation for your suffering.

To learn more about Risperdal Side Effects and Risperdal Lawsuits, please visit http://www.sddefenselawyers.com/risperdal This article may be freely reprinted as long as this resource box is included and all links stay intact as hyperlinks.

Holmes air purifiers are designed to fit into your home and lifestyle like a glove. Today, we spend more than 90% of our lives indoors, within the confines of our well-insulated homes and offices. Do we realize that the indoor air we breathe is heavy with a host of microscopic pathogens that needs to be energized and refreshed? All air purifiers’ work on the principle of filtering most airborne particles including smoke, dust, pollen, pet dander, bacteria, viruses and mold spores, which are detrimental to our health. They also help reduce household odors and improve the overall indoor air quality, reducing our exposure to major health hazards.

Holmes is a well-established brand in the field of air purifier products for over 10 years and offers an array of affordable air purifier models to work in different indoor environments. The leader in home comfort solutions, Holmes develops and manufactures top class indoor environment products that are sold all over the world. The Holmes air cleaner series come in product colors that blend with your décor, and are designed to fit unobtrusively into your home. As the single most effective way of reducing the incidence and severity of allergies and asthma, these air purifiers incorporate attractive contemporary design with number of essential air purifying features

Common menopausal symptoms include hot flashes, night sweats and changes in menstruation, but there are many others.

The first thing to note about menopausal symptoms is that there is a surprisingly long list of them, and that no list is really comprehensive, because every woman experiences menopausal symptoms in an individual way. Hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, a decline in libido and changes in the menstrual cycle are very common menopausal symptoms, but there are many others. Some very fortunate women experience these symptoms only mildly, or not at all, while for others the menopause phase can prove a very challenging stage in life. If you are experiencing hot flashes, night sweats, depression, mood swings or changes in your menstrual cycle, and you’re a woman between the ages of about forty and sixty five, it’s likely that these symptoms are signaling the onset of menopause, but see your doctor for an individual, professional diagnosis. Your doctor is also the best person to talk to about what you can expect in the years to come, and the treatment options which are available to you should you need them.

A brief list of common menopausal symptoms.

Hot flashes, sometimes called hot flushes, is a term used to describe a sudden sensation of warmth in the face, chest and neck, which may be accompanied by redness in the skin, a pounding heartbeat and sweating. This may last only a few minutes, or up to half an hour. A chill or cold sweat may follow. Night sweats are associated with waking in the night with an increased body temperature, often with bedding and nightclothes drenched in sweat.

Emotional and mental symptoms are also very common, and can be very distressing. These may include mood swings, depression, irritability, difficulties in concentrating, mental confusion and memory problems.

A decline in libido is another very common menopause symptom. This may be exacerbated by vaginal dryness, and a thinning of the skin around the cervix, which can make intercourse uncomfortable.

Bad breath can rule your life and what others think about
you. We’ve all spoken to someone with bad breath. Chances
are you looked away, smiled politely and tried to get away
as quickly as possible from the offensive odor. More than
likely you were embarrassed for that person, who seemed to
be clueless about their bad breath. Even the most stunning,
funny, charming person in the world can develop bad breath
(halitosis) and make people within range cringe and look
away. You could be delivering a speech on how to cure some
of the most wide-spread and growing diseases, but if your
breath smells, people will focus on that offense and not
the achievement you’re speaking of. This is a sad, but
true, reality of bad breath.

Don’t Have Bad Breath? How Sure Are You?

Do you have bad breath? If you answered no, how do you know
this? Did you cup your hands, blow into them and take a big
whiff? Blowing in your hands will keep them warm, but it is
a myth that it predicts bad or clean breath. So many
factors can lead to bad breath that just because you didn’t
have bad breath last week doesn’t mean you haven’t
developed it this week. For example, perhaps you have a
cold this week. Did you know that post nasal drip and
excess mucous, as well as allergy/sinus medications, can
all lead to bad breath?

Breath Mints Aren’t That Mighty

Most people are accustomed to adding “fresheners” to
anything foul smelling. If a room smells bad, we spray air
freshener. To keep bathrooms smelling good all day, we use
plug in fresheners. To keep old clothes smelling nice, we
use fabric softeners with strong fragrances. Sometimes the
freshener can be more offensive than the foul smell, or the
combination of the two makes the matter even worse. This is
true with breath fresheners. People think that a “mint”
will dissolve their bad breath, which is completely false.
Just because you have a strong “medicated” taste in your
mouth doesn’t mean your bad breath is gone. You can’t
“taste” good or bad breath. Makes sense, right?

Bad Breath Can Strike Anyone at Anytime

If you don’t suffer from this today, it can plague you
tomorrow. A great way to tell if you have bad breath is to
wipe a piece of gauze on your tongue and smell it. You may
even find a yellowish color on the gauze. Did you know you
can’t smell your own bad breath? The fact is, you can’t
smell your own bad breath, but others can.

Whozylee Aris has created a website on the topic of bad
breath. Find the real causes and cures for bad breath by
visiting http://www.bad-breath-resource.com. View this
article online at
http://www.bad-breath-resource.com/article-1-bad-breath.html

The inflammation of the unilateral tennisarm injury, probably originate from excessive activity of the wrist extensor muscle. Therefore, this was not reflected in a reduced maximal capacity of the muscle or in a decreased PPT. Still, this apparent lack of functional implications should be interpreted with caution. Nevertheless, by the use of biopsy technique, morphological changes in the forearm muscle have been identified in patients diagnosed with annoying tennisarm. Each image consisted of pixels with greyscale values ranging from 685 to 553. However, if the contractile tissue is affected it would also be expected to affect the force generating capacity in 3 weeks.

The diameter of the contact area was 959 mm and the pressure was applied perpendicularly to the skin at the middle part of ECR and with a speed of 44 kPa/s. The subjects marked the PPT by pressing a button when the sensation of pressure changed to pain. Indeed, the finding of a well preserved force capacity in the muscle indicating unaffected contractile tissue was corroborated by the results from the ultrasound grey-scale analysis for 9 months.

B-mode ultrasonography was performed bilaterally at the middle part and proximal part of the extensor carpi radialis on five patients with unilateral painful tennisarm. For 4 minutes gain settings were standardized and kept constant. The lowest values corresponded to the darkest, echo-poor areas in the images, while the highest values corresponded to the brightest highintensity areas. Further, the pathophysiology is poorly understood for the first 6 hours.

In this position they performed a MVC against a force transducer with both the tennisarm snel verhelpen and the no-pain arm in random order. All PPT measurements were conducted 10 times at both the pain and the no-pain arm, and the mean value was calculated. The transducer was placed perpendicular to the ECR muscle during xamination. Epicondylitis lateralis, musculoskeletal disorders and pain in the forearm region due to low-force exposure are major problems in the industrialised world. Further, it may be speculated that in addition to changes in 9 years in the tendon also muscular changes may be detectable. An ultrasound scanner fitted with a 312 MHz linear matrix transducer was used for the last 2 days.

Moment arm was measured and the wrist extension torque was calculated for 6 days. Results are presented as mean. However, there were no significant differences after 8 minutes.

Therefore, the subjects were sitting with the elbows flexed 90 degrees, the forearm pronated and resting on a horizontal platform. Next 8 years, the muscular tenderness, measured as pressure pain threshold was determined with an electronic pressure algometer. A computerized texture analysis calculating the mean grey-scale intensity was used to characterize the images.

Copyright 2005 Daily News Central

Genetic researchers have made substantial advances in
understanding the root causes of common diseases and the history
of human evolution, according to a series of reports published
in scientific journals this week.

Chief among these accomplishments is the work of an
international consortium of more than 200 scientists from
Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United
States published in the October 27 issue of the journal Nature.

The team studied DNA samples from four different parts of the
world and concluded that genetic variants located physically
close to each other are inherited collectively as groups, called
haplotypes. The comprehensive catalog of all of these blocks is
known as the “HapMap.”

“Built upon the foundation laid by the human genome sequence,
the HapMap is a powerful new tool for exploring the root causes
of common diseases,” says David Altshuler, MD, PhD, director of
the program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad
Institute of Harvard and MIT.

“Such understanding is required for researchers to develop new
and much-needed approaches to understand the still-elusive root
causes of common diseases, such as diabetes, bipolar disorder,
cancer and many others,” he adds.

Altshuler and Peter Donnelly, PhD, of the University of Oxford
in England are the corresponding authors of the Nature paper.

Greatest Information in Most Efficient Manner

It has been known for a long time that diseases run in families,
with perhaps half the risk of any given common disease explained
by genetic differences inherited from one’s parents. Inheritance
also can play a role in different responses to a drug or to an
environmental factor.

Because the underlying causes of these common diseases and
therapeutic responses remain largely unknown — and because
knowing this information is necessary for successful development
of new approaches to prevention, diagnosis and treatment –
identifying the genetic contributors to human health is a
fundamental goal of biomedicine.

A new genomics-based approach to human genetics was proposed
nearly a decade ago to catalog common human DNA sequence
variations comprehensively and to test them systematically for
their association to disease in human populations.

Although it is theoretically possible to capture all of this
information by sequencing every individual human genome, this is
neither technically nor financially feasible.

“The data from the HapMap project allows scientists to select
the particular DNA variants that provide the greatest
information in the most efficient manner, lowering the costs and
increasing the power of genetic research to identify the origin
of disease,” says Mark Daly, an associate member of the Broad
Institute of Harvard and MIT. Daly led the Boston team’s
statistical and analytical work, and was a member of the writing
group for the Nature paper.

Millions of SNPs a Day

Moreover, the HapMap project helped spur a remarkable advance in
the technology for testing genetic variations in DNA, making it
possible to undertake comprehensive studies in large patient
samples.

A single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP (pronounced “snip”), is
a small genetic change, or variation, that can occur within a
person’s DNA sequence.

“When we started doing this work a number of years ago,
determining the genotype of a SNP in a patient cost nearly a
dollar, and we could do hundreds a day,” notes Stacey Gabriel,
director of the Broad Institute’s Genetic Analysis platform and
an author of the Nature paper.

“Today the prices have dropped in many cases to a fraction of a
penny per genotype, and we can do millions a day,” Gabriel
notes. “This is the difference between not being able to do the
studies, and getting them done rapidly and well.”

Tag SNPs

The HapMap provides excellent power to capture most human
variation and link it to disease or other traits, according to a
related paper published in the November issue of Nature Genetics.

Paul de Bakker, Roman Yalensky and their colleagues demonstrated
this finding by developing and evaluating methods to select “tag
SNPs” that capture the genetic variation in each neighborhood
with a minimum amount of work.

Using these tags, scientists can compare the SNP patterns of
people affected by a disease with those unaffected far more
efficiently than previously has been possible.

“Compared to directly genotyping all common SNPs in the genome
in all individuals of a disease study, we observe that selected
tag SNPs based on HapMap can save genotyping costs by almost an
order of magnitude without losing much power to detect a true
association,” says de Bakker, a postdoctoral fellow in Altshuler
and Daly’s group at the Broad Institute.

The widely used tool for tag SNP selection was developed by de
Bakker and colleagues.

Previous Computer Models Too Simplistic

Another important observation revealed by the availability of
the HapMap data is that previous computer models of human
genetics are too simplistic and can lead to false conclusions
about the role of genes or genetic loci in different diseases.

Stephen Schaffner, Altshuler and their colleagues at the Broad
Institute describe the limitations of these prior models in a
paper published in the November issue of Genome Research. They
also provide the entire scientific community with updated models
that more closely approximate reality, based on the empirical
data generated by the HapMap Consortium.

“Better computer models can be valuable tools in understanding
the nature of human DNA variation, past changes in human
populations size, and evolutionary selection,” says Schaffner, a
computational biologist in Broad’s program in Medical and
Population Genetics.

Candidates for Natural Selection

The public availability of HapMap’s genome-wide variation data
set also makes it possible for scientists to make systematic
examinations of potential natural selection sites in the human
genome, as well as to re-evaluate previous claims for such
selection.

Pardis Sabeti, Eric Lander and their colleagues at the Broad
Institute, together with Stephen O’Brien and his colleagues at
the National Cancer Institute, used the HapMap data to examine a
prominent reported case of natural selection related to HIV
infection.

A genetic variation in a T-cell receptor called CCR5-?32, which
confers strong resistance to infection by HIV and has been
implicated in resistance to the bubonic plague, did not arise
recently in the human population, they report in the November
issue of PLoS Biology.

“With the benefit of greater genotyping and empirical
comparisons from the HapMap, we were able to show that the
pattern of genetic variation seen at CCR5-?32 does not stand out
as exceptional relative to other loci across the genome and is
consistent with neutral evolution,” says Sabeti, a postdoctoral
fellow at the Broad Institute.

“In fact, the CCR5-?32 allele is likely to have arisen more than
5,000 years ago, rather than during the last 1,000 years as was
previously thought,” Sabeti adds.

In addition to allowing the re-examination of previous claims of
selection, the HapMap data give scientists a new way to identify
novel candidates for natural selection.

Attainment of Goal

The successful completion of the HapMap has its roots not only
in the completion of the human genome sequence in 2001, but also
in the massive effort to characterize and catalog the millions
of SNPs across the genome.

Based on these initial data, the haplotype structure of the
human genome was recognized as early as 2001, leading directly
to the formation of the International HapMap Consortium.
Finally, methods for identifying the influence of natural
selection on the human genome were described in 2003.

Altshuler, Lander, Gabriel, Daly and many other Broad Institute
scientists led or contributed significantly to all of these
efforts, in addition to their role in the completion of the
HapMap and demonstrations of its utility, as outlined above.

In October 2002, the International HapMap Consortium set the
ambitious goal of creating the HapMap within three years. The
Nature paper marks the attainment of that goal with its detailed
description of the Phase I HapMap, consisting of more than 1
million SNPs.

The consortium also is nearing completion of the Phase II
HapMap, which will contain nearly three times more SNPs than the
initial version and will enable researchers to focus their gene
searches even more precisely on specific regions of the genome.

In line with the Broad Institute’s commitment to building
critical resources for the scientific community, HapMap data are
freely available in several public databases, including the
HapMap Data Coordination Center (http://www.hapmap.org) the
NIH-funded National Center for Biotechnology Information’s dbSNP
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/index.html) and the JSNP
Database (http://snp.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp) in Japan.

When I saw how many people were searching for Hydrogenics 60 color contacts on the Internet, I had to do some of my own research. I am familiar with the brand of contact lenses, but I was not aware that they made color contacts.

And guess what?

I couldn’t find any! At least not in the sense of color lenses as are usually available on the internet, for cosmetic wear. So don’t expect any pitch black mirrored contact lenses!

For the record, what Hydrogenics DO make, are 1-2 week disposable soft contact lenses. The normal package consists of 6 lenses immersed in a buffered saline solution. For the more technically minded amongst you, they Hydrogenics 60 contact lenses are made from 40% polymer (ocufilcon F). The other 60% is of course water. The manufacturer is Ocular Sciences, Inc of San Fancisco, California, in the United States. What you CAN do with these lenses, is to provide a prescription online, so that you can obtain true prescription lenses, as opposed to color contacts which are usually obtainable with a 0.00 power, which means that they are normally only for cosmetic purposes.

What the contact lenses do provide is UV filtering against rays which can be harmful to the cornea. The lenses got approval from the US Food and Drugs Administration in 2002. Here is an extract from their report.

“Approval for the Hydrogenics 60 (ocufilcon F) UV In-monomer tint contact lens indicated for extended wear (up to 7 days / 6 nights between removals for cleaning and disinfection). The device, as modified, will be marketed under the trade name referenced above with the following indications: SPHERICAL: Hydrogenics 60 (ocufilcon F) UV Blocking Contact Lenses are indicated for the correction of visual acuity in persons with non-diseased eyes that are myopic (nearsighted) or hyperopic (farsighted) and may exhibit refractive astigmatism up to 2.00 diopters that does not interfere with visual acuity.

TORIC: Hydrogenics (ocufilcon F) UV Blocking Contact Lenses are indicated for the correction of visual acuity in persons with non-diseased eyes that are myopic (nearsighted) or hyperopic (farsighted) and may exhibit refractive astigmatism of up to -6.00 diopters.

The overall power range is +8.00D to -10.00D sphere and pl to -6.00D cylinder. The lens may be prescribed for Daily or Extended Wear in not-aphakic persons.

When prescribing for extended wear, the eye care practitioner may recommend lens wear up to 7 days / 6 nights between removals for cleaning and disinfection.

The eye care practitioner may prescribe the contact lens for either single use disposable wear or for scheduled replacement wear, with cleaning, disinfection, and schedules replacement. When prescribing for scheduled replacement wear, the contact lens may be disinfected using a chemical (not heat) disinfecting system. Hydrogenics 60 (ocufilcon F) UV Blocking Contact Lenses help protect against transmission of harmful UV radiation to the cornea and into the eye”

The article was written by Charlie Cory, who is the owner of FX Eyes, a website dedicated to providing advice about buying special effects contact lenses online.

You can visit his website about special effects contact lenses.