Azarenka Defeats Li in Australia to Keep Women’s Title


Dennis Sabangan/European Pressphoto Agency


Victoria Azarenka reacted after winning the Australian Open singles title on Saturday.







MELBOURNE, Australia — In a momentum-swinging final interrupted by fireworks and, yes, more medical timeouts, Victoria Azarenka defended her Australian Open singles title by rallying to defeat Li Na 4-6, 6-4, 6-3.




The victory, which allowed Azarenka to retain the No. 1 ranking ahead of Serena Williams, was a tribute to Azarenka’s powers of resilience and concentration.


Far from her relentless best, she managed to overcome a crowd that audibly favored Li and an emotional week in which she was widely criticized for taking a medical timeout at a critical phase of her semifinal match over Sloane Stephens of the United States.


When Li, of China, missed her final shot, Azarenka dropped her racket, eyes wide, and then went to the net to shake hands with her opponent. She was soon on her chair sobbing into a towel. She then rose and went to the opposite side of the court to reach up and shake hands with members of her team, including her coach Sam Sumyk and her friend, the musician Redfoo.


“Enjoy this one, you are a champion,” Sumyk said.


The victory was the latest major coup on a hard court for Azarenka, the globe-trotting 23-year-old from Belarus. Her power baseline game is a fine fit for the true-bouncing hard-court game.


The match, often better drama than tennis, included 16 service breaks, and both players finished with significantly more unforced errors than winners. But on an unsteady night, Azarenka was the steadier force, making 18 winners and 28 unforced errors, while Li had 36 winners and 57 unforced errors.


The match changed tone and rhythm for good with Azarenka leading 3-1 and Li serving in the second set. After a swing volley from Azarenka, Li tried to shift direction quickly. But her left ankle gave way and she went down, her racket clattering on the court as she winced and rolled onto her back.


When she rose, she hesitated to put weight on her left foot and limped to her chair for treatment where her ankle was wrapped during a three-minute medical timeout.


Li returned and won five straight points to hold serve and go up 0-40 with Azarenka serving. But, in what proved to be the critical game, Azarenka was able to recover and win five straight points and to take a 4-2 lead. She later closed out the set.


Then in the third set, with Li up 2-1, play was interrupted for about 10 minutes for a nearby fireworks display. On the first point after play resumed, Li’s left ankle buckled again as she ran to her left. She fell onto her back and her head slammed against the hard court surface.


Initially dazed, she lay on the baseline where she was attended by tournament medical personnel; she eventually returned to her chair under her own power where they continued to examine her for injuries. In total another seven minutes passed before play resumed. Azarenka reeled off the next three games to retake command of the match, this time for good.


The victory, which required 2 hours and 40 minutes, allowed Azarenka to join an elite club. She is now the fifth active women’s player with more than one Grand Slam singles title. The others: Serena Williams with 15, Venus Williams with 7, Maria Sharapova with 4 and Svetlana Kuznetsova with 2.


Serena Williams had come into the tournament as the prohibitive favorite but was stunned in the quarterfinals after experiencing back problems and eventually losing to the 19-year-old Stephens.


 Azarenka had scares of her own, dropping a set to Jamie Hampton in the third round and then losing her composure in the final stages of her match against Stephens. Treated on a changeover after complaining of breathing problems with Stephens about to serve to stay in the match at 4-5 in the second set, Azarenka eventually left the court for medical care.


The total break lasted nearly 10 minutes, and Stephens’s coach David Nainkin later suggested that Azarenka had “bent” the rules to shift the momentum of the match.


Other analysts and coaches were also skeptical, but Azarenka, while acknowledging the coincidental timing of the injury timeout, insisted that she was suffering from a legitimate injury: a rib problem that required treatment.


In the wake of the debate, the crowd in Rod Laver Arena for the final greeted Li with considerably more warmth than Azarenka on this cool evening. Azarenka’s now-traditional garb for walking on court — head covered by sweatshirt hood — seemed appropriate given the cool temperature.


The crowd support became more evident as the match progressed, but Azarenka, one of the game’s most intense competitors, managed to recover from the loss of the first set and keep her eye on the prize despite three extended breaks in play: two when Li required medical timeouts and one for the customary Australia Day fireworks display.


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Facebook Profile May Expose Mental Illness






A person’s Facebook profile may reveal signs of mental illness that might not necessarily emerge in a session with a psychiatrist, a new study suggests.


“The beauty of social media activity as a tool in psychological diagnosis is that it removes some of the problems associated with patients’ self-reporting,” said study researcher Elizabeth Martin, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Missouri. “For example, questionnaires often depend on a person’s memory, which may or may not be accurate.”






Martin’s team recruited more than 200 college students and had them fill out questionnaires to evaluate their levels of extroversion, paranoia, enjoyment of social interactions, and endorsement of strange beliefs. (For example, they were asked whether they agreed with the statement, “Some people can make me aware of them just by thinking about me.”)


The students also were asked to log onto Facebook. They were told they would have the option to black-out parts of their profile before some of it was printed out for the researchers to examine.


“By asking patients to share their Facebook activity, we were able to see how they expressed themselves naturally,” Martin explained in a statement. “Even the parts of their Facebook activities that they chose to conceal exposed information about their psychological state.”


Participants who showed higher levels of social anhedonia — a condition characterized by lack of pleasure from social interactions — typically had fewer Facebook friends, shared fewer photos, and communicated less frequently on the site, the researchers found.


Meanwhile, those who hid more of their Facebook activity before presenting their profiles to researchers were more likely to hold odd beliefs and show signs of perceptual aberrations, which are irregular experiences of one’s senses. They also exhibited higher levels of paranoia.


“However, it should be noted that participants higher on paranoia did not differ from participants lower in paranoia in terms of the amount of personal information shared,” the researchers wrote in their study detailed Dec. 30, 2012, in the journal Psychiatry Research. That finding suggests this group might be more comfortable sharing information in an online setting than in the face-to-face interactions with the experimenter.


The researchers said information culled from social networking sites potentially could be used to inform diagnostic materials or intervention strategies for people with mental health issues.


Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We’re also on Facebook & Google+.


Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Disney says JJ Abrams to direct next 'Star Wars'


LOS ANGELES (AP) — It's official. The force is with J.J. Abrams.


The Walt Disney Co. issued a statement Friday night confirming reports that had been circulating for two days that Abrams, Emmy-award-winning creator of TV's "Lost" and director of 2009's "Star Trek" movie, has been pegged to direct the seventh installment of the "Star Wars" franchise.


"J.J. is the perfect director to helm this," said Kathleen Kennedy, the movie's producer and president of Lucasfilm, which was acquired by Disney last month for $4.06 billion.


"Beyond having such great instincts as a filmmaker, he has an intuitive understanding of this franchise. He understands the essence of the Star Wars experience," Kennedy said in the statement.


The movie will have a script from "Toy Story 3" writer Michael Arndt and a 2015 release.


Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" in the original trilogy, will work as a consultant on the new project.


Abrams has already headed the reboot of another storied space franchise, "Star Trek," for rival studio Paramount Pictures. The next installment in that series, "Star Trek: Into Darkness," is set to hit theaters May 17.


But he has long been known as a "Star Wars" devotee. Abrams spoke about the plot of the original "Star Wars" in the lecture series "TED Talks" in March 2007, and reportedly became enamored of "Lost" co-creator Damon Lindelof partly because Lindelof was wearing a "Star Wars" T-shirt when they first met.


In 2009, Abrams told the Los Angeles Times: "As a kid, 'Star Wars' was much more my thing than 'Star Trek' was."


In Friday night's statement he called it an "absolute honor" to get the job.


"I may be even more grateful to George Lucas now than I was as a kid," Abrams said.


Lucas himself said in the statement that "I've consistently been impressed with J.J. as a filmmaker and storyteller. He's an ideal choice to direct the new Star Wars film and the legacy couldn't be in better hands."


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40 Years After Roe v. Wade, Thousands March to Oppose Abortion


Drew Angerer/The New York Times


Pro-life activists made their way down Constitution Avenue toward the Supreme Court during the March for Life in Washington on Friday.







WASHINGTON — Three days after the 40th anniversary of the decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion, tens of thousands of abortion opponents from around the country came to the National Mall on Friday for the annual March for Life rally, which culminated in a demonstration in front of the Supreme Court building.




On a gray morning when the temperature was well below freezing, the crowd pressed in close against the stage to hear more than a dozen speakers, who included Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, who recently introduced legislation to withhold financing from Planned Parenthood, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky; Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley of Boston; and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania and Republican presidential candidate.


Mr. Santorum spoke of his wife’s decision not to have an abortion after they learned that their child — their daughter Bella, now 4 — had a rare genetic disorder called Trisomy 18.


“We all know that death is never better, never better,” Mr. Santorum said. “Bella is better for us, and we are better because of Bella.”


Jeanne Monahan, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said that the march was both somber and hopeful.


“We’ve lost 55 million Americans to abortion,” she said. “At the same time, I think we’re starting to win. We’re winning in the court of public opinion, we’re winning in the states with legislation.”


Though the main event officially started at noon, the day began much earlier for the participants, with groups in matching scarves engaged in excited chatter on the subway and gaggles of schoolchildren wearing name tags around their necks. Arriving on the Mall, attendees were greeted with free signs (“Defund Planned Parenthood” and “Personhood for Everyone”) and a man barking into a megaphone, “Ireland is on the brink of legalizing abortion, which is not good.”


The march came two months after the 2012 campaign season, in which social issues like abortion largely took a back seat to the focus on the economy. But the issue did come up in Congressional races in which Republican candidates made controversial statements about rape or abortion. In Indiana, Richard E. Mourdock, a Republican candidate for the Senate, said in a debate that he believed that pregnancies resulting from rape were something that “God intended,” and in Illinois, Representative Joe Walsh said in a debate that abortion was never necessary to save the life of the mother because of “advances in science and technology.” Both men lost, hurt by a backlash from female voters.


Recent polls show that while a majority of Americans do not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned entirely, many favor some restrictions. In a Gallup poll released this week, 52 percent of those surveyed said that abortions should be legal only under certain circumstances, while 28 percent said they should be legal under all circumstances, and 18 percent said they should be illegal under all circumstances. In a Pew poll this month, 63 percent of respondents said they did not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned completely, and 29 percent said they did — views largely consistent with surveys taken over the past two decades.


“Most Americans want some restrictions on abortion,” Ms. Monahan said. “We see abortion as the human rights abuse of today.”


Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, who spoke via a recorded video, called on the protest group, particularly the young people, to make abortion “a relic of the past.”


“Human life is not an economic or political commodity, and no government on earth has the right to treat it that way,” he said.


The crowd was dotted with large banners, many bearing the names of the attendees’ home states and churches and colleges. Gary Storey, 36, stood holding a handmade sign that read “I was adopted. Thanks Mom for my life.” Next to him stood his adoptive mother, Ellen Storey, 66, who held her own handmade sign with a picture of her six children and the words “To the mothers of our four adopted children, ‘Thank You’ for their lives.”


Mr. Storey said he was grateful for the decision by his biological mother to carry through with her pregnancy. “Beats the alternative,” he joked.


Last week, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America started a new Web site, and on Tuesday, its president, Cecile Richards, released a statement supporting abortion rights.


“Planned Parenthood understands that abortion is a deeply personal and often complex decision for a woman to consider, if and when she needs it,” she said. “A woman should have accurate information about all of her options around her pregnancy. To protect her health and the health of her family, a woman must have access to safe, legal abortion without interference from politicians, as protected by the Supreme Court for the last 40 years.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2013

A summary that appeared on the home page of NYTimes.com with an earlier version of this article misstated the day of the march. It took place on Friday, not Thursday.



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Labor Relations Board Rulings Could Be Undone



By ruling that Mr. Obama’s three recess appointments last January were illegal, the federal appeals court ruling, if upheld, would leave the board with just one member, short of the quorum needed to issue any rulings. The Obama administration could appeal the court ruling, but no announcement was made on Friday.


If the Supreme Court were to uphold Friday’s ruling, issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, it would mean that the labor board did not have a quorum since last January and that all its rulings since then should be nullified.


Many Republicans and business groups applauded Friday’s ruling. They often assert that the appointments Mr. Obama made to the board have transformed it into a tool of organized labor. But many Democrats and labor unions say Mr. Obama’s appointments restored ideological balance to the board after it was tipped in favor of business interests under President George W. Bush


Mark G. Pearce, the board’s chairman, issued a statement saying the board disagreed with the ruling and suggested that other appeals courts hearing cases about the constitutionality of Mr. Obama’s appointments could reach a different conclusion.


“In the meantime, the board has important work to do,” said Mr. Pearce, whose agency oversees enforcement of the laws governing strikes and unionization drives. “We will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decisions.”


Unless the Senate confirms future nominees to the board — Senate Republicans have blocked several of Mr. Obama’s board nominees — Mr. Pearce will be the only member left if Friday’s ruling is upheld. The board has five seats.


Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who is the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a statement that urged the recess appointees to “do the right thing and step down.” He added, “To avoid further damage to the economy, the N.L.R.B. must take the responsible course and cease issuing any further opinions until a constitutionally sound quorum can be established.”


The three disputed recess appointees included two Democrats, Sharon Block, deputy labor secretary, and Richard Griffin, general counsel to the operating engineers’ union; and one Republican, Terence Flynn, a counsel to a board member. Mr. Flynn resigned last May after being accused of leaking materials about the group’s deliberations. Another Republican member, Brian Hayes, stepped down when his term expired last month.


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A Staff Shake-Up at the White House


WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to shake up his White House staff on Friday, installing a new team largely made up of familiar faces moved to different positions as he gears up for an intense push on sweeping legislation early in his second term.


Mr. Obama will name Denis R. McDonough, a longtime aide and currently the principal deputy national security adviser, as his new White House chief of staff and will shuffle around a series of other officials in the West Wing. The president plans to make the announcements in the East Room at 12:10 p.m., according to a White House official.


Moving up to deputy chief of staff will be Rob Nabors, currently the president’s legislative affairs chief, and replacing Mr. McDonough at the National Security Council will be Tony Blinken, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director and another early Obama aide, will move up to senior adviser, replacing David Plouffe, who is departing this week.


Replacing Mr. Pfeiffer as communications chief will be his deputy, Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s White House. Serving as deputy senior adviser for communications and strategy will be David Simas, a former White House aide who served as head of polling and focus-group research for the president’s re-election campaign. Replacing Mr. Nabors running the legislative affairs office will be Miguel Rodriguez, a former aide to departing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and more recently Senate liaison for the Obama White House.


Lisa Monaco, currently the assistant attorney general for national security, will move over to the White House to replace John O. Brennan, the president’s adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, who has been tapped to take over as director of the Central Intelligence Agency if confirmed by the Senate.


The White House announced separately Friday that Christopher P. Lu, one of Mr. Obama’s early aides dating back to his Senate days, will be leaving as White House cabinet secretary, the liaison to the various government departments. Replacing him, according to a White House official will be Danielle Gray, the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council. Katy Kale will become the president’s assistant for management and administration, moving up from deputy.


While most of the announcements were pending the noontime event, Mr. Obama did release a written statement praising Mr. Lu and his “dedication and tireless efforts.” The president made clear that he does not accept Mr. Lu’s departure, saying he has asked him to return in another capacity. “After he enjoys some time off, I hope he will consider those opportunities,” Mr. Obama said.


In a separate move, the first lady’s deputy communications director, Semonti Stephens, announced Thursday that she was leaving to move to San Francisco.


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Nokia CEO closes the door on a potential Android smartphone






Nokia (NOK) CEO Stephen Elop on Thursday shot down rumors that his company might be interested in developing Android-based smartphones. During Nokia’s fourth-quarter earnings call, the executive reiterated his support for the company’s Asha phones and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone platform, while shutting the door on earlier Android rumors.


[More from BGR: Unlocking your smartphone will be illegal starting next week]






“We are clearly innovating with Microsoft around Windows Phone, and are focused on taking that to lower and lower price points,” he said, according to TechCrunch. “You will see that over time [we will] compete with Android. But at the same time we’ve said consistently — and we’re just beginning to see it in the Asha full-touch products — that we will continue to innovate around our Asha smartphone line in order to compete with the very lowest levels of Android.”


[More from BGR: Why the iOS-Android feud is so intense: It’s about core philosophy more than products]


The executive also took shots at Google (GOOG) and the openness of its Android operating system, or lack thereof.


“The situation that Android is facing, where the amount of fragmentation that you’re seeing is increasing as people take it in different directions, is of course offset by Google’s efforts to turn an open ecosystem into something that’s quite a bit more closed as you’ve seen quite recently,” Elop said.


Elop concluded by saying that Nokia is “not in a situation where we are considering something other than Windows Phone combined with what we’re doing with Asha.”


This article was originally published on BGR.com


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'Dallas' returns with J.R. Ewing's final schemes


NEW YORK (AP) — J.R. Ewing wouldn't hesitate to cheat his fellow man. He also famously cheated death.


In the second-season finale of "Dallas" back in 1980, he was shot by an unknown assailant in his office and left for dead. But he recovered nicely, and the cliffhanger question that gripped the nation (Who shot J.R.?) was answered that November in an episode seen by 80 million viewers.


This time, J.R. won't get off so easy. During the second season of TNT's rebooted "Dallas," J.R. cashes in his chips and goes to his reward ... wherever that may be.


Meanwhile, viewers, however braced they are for J.R.'s demise, will have to reckon with the loss of arguably TV's greatest villain, and bid farewell to the actor who portrayed him so indelibly and also cheated death for years. Larry Hagman, who died of cancer at 81 the day after Thanksgiving, was diagnosed in 1992 with cirrhosis of the liver from a life of heavy drinking and, three years later, when a malignant tumor was discovered on his liver, successfully underwent a transplant.


This double loss would be a burden for any show to bear. "Dallas," returning at 9 p.m. EST Monday, comes fully loaded.


"I think viewers want closure," said Linda Gray, who plays J.R.'s long-suffering ex-wife, Sue Ellen. "They want to mourn Larry Hagman and J.R. Ewing. They want to know they can grieve the fact he won't be around."


But all that comes later. With its two-hour season premiere, "Dallas" carries on in familiar fashion, with the expected two-timing, squabbles, a kidnapping revealed, a stolen identity and assorted other mischief.


And never fear: J.R., though visibly frail, continues his reign as a scheming oilman and rascally Ewing patriarch.


"I came over to deliver some muffins to the pretty little secretaries," he announces on making an unannounced visit to Ewing Energies headquarters before he laments, "Who could have guessed so many would turn out to be MEN? Where's the sport in THAT?"


In another scene, J.R. shares sly counsel with his son, John Ross, on double-crossing other members of the family: "Love, hate, jealousy: Mix 'em up and they make a mean martini. And when we take over Ewing Energies, you'll slake your thirst — with a twist!"


The new "Dallas," which debuted last June, is stocked with a troupe of young regulars (including Josh Henderson, who plays John Ross), as well as veterans of the original CBS series, notably Gray and Patrick Duffy as J.R.'s ever-upright brother, Bobby. J.R. will appear in a minimum of five or as many as seven of the season's episodes before he meets his fate.


After that, can "Dallas" survive the dual deaths of its central character and legendary star?


"Larry being gone doesn't eliminate the influence of the character of J.R.," Duffy pointed out. Who knows what land mines J.R. will have left behind? "We can find business deals he did or schemes he started that now are coming home to roost, and they can turn up for years to come."


"Whatever will happen on the show, we will be talking about J.R. Ewing and he will have done things that have a ripple effect," Gray agreed. "He will always be there."


"There's a lot of driving forces on the show — not just J.R.," added "Dallas" executive producer Cynthia Cidre, who, interviewed by phone a couple of weeks ago, was parked outside a posh Dallas social club where the wake for J.R. was about to be filmed.


She said this season she tried to use Hagman sparingly.


"He was the most delightful man and a total professional," she said, "but he wasn't well and we didn't want to overtax him."


Now, with his passing, "we want to give J.R., and Larry, the proper send-off."


But she insisted there had been no contingency plan for how to plot J.R.'s demise in the event Hagman died in mid-season.


"We didn't have a Plan B, on purpose," said Cidre. "We just knew that we had Larry, so let's use him, let's enjoy him, and if something happens, we'll scramble and fix it. I had great faith in the writers' room. We knew the day might come and what we would do then: Figure it out."


That day came in late November when she got a call from Duffy. "He told me, 'Larry's in the hospital and it isn't good. He's saying goodbye.' In 24 hours we had fixed one of the scripts. We had two more scripts that had to be adjusted, and then this episode we're shooting now, the Goodbye Episode."


Roughly 85 percent of the season's story line remains intact, she said, supplemented by the death of J.R. and the mystery surrounding it: Who Killed J.R.?


"The mystery has all the machinations of a great J.R. business deal, as opposed to a whodunit," said Duffy. "Cynthia constructed a really interesting plot, of which I know Bobby's portion" — including whodunit — "but I don't know other stuff."


"We all know, up to a point," Gray said. "But they've got secret pages that we've not seen."


"I hope that we have come up with something really wonderful and enticing," said Cidre, "and by the time you're done watching episode 208, which I call the Funeral Episode, I hope you're saying, 'Omigod, I didn't see that coming, and I can't wait to watch the rest of the season.'"


The mystery, she said, will continue through episode 15, "with a giant, delightful, delicious climax in the season finale."


To get there, shooting continues until April on the Dallas set, where, even two months after Hagman's passing, "I'm lonely because my best friend isn't there to play with," Duffy said. "I was with him from 1978 until his final hours in the hospital. But I have no regrets. Every day I think of him and smile."


"I keep expecting him to walk in the door," Gray said. "He's so missed. But his presence is everywhere!"


___


Online:


http://www.tntdrama.com


___


Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier


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The New Old Age Blog: Time to Recognize Mild Cognitive Disorder?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published and periodically updated by the American Psychiatric Association, is one of those documents few laypeople ever read, but many of us are affected by.

It can make it easier or harder to get an insurance company or Medicare to cover treatments, for example. It factors into a variety of legal and governmental decisions.

And on a personal basis, a psychiatric diagnosis may be welcome (having a name and a treatment plan for what’s bothering us can be comforting) or not (are we really suffering from a mental disorder if we seem depressed after a family member dies?).

That last question refers to a change in the new DSM5, to be published in May, that has generated considerable controversy and that I discussed in an earlier post: the removal of the “bereavement exclusion,” once part of the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

Another element of the revised D.S.M. could also affect readers: It will include something called mild neurocognitive disorder. The task force revising the manual wanted to align psychiatry with the rest of medicine, which has already begun to distinguish between levels of impairment, said its chairman, Dr. David J. Kupfer, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist.

True enough, as we have reported before. Neurologists call it mild cognitive impairment, a stage where cognitive decline becomes noticeable enough to affect daily functioning, yet people can still live independently and have not progressed to dementia.

In fact, a large proportion of people with mild cognitive problems never will develop dementia — but doctors and researchers cannot yet determine who will and who won’t. Biomarkers that could identify the biological brain changes that presage dementia are still years away.

Will it be helpful, then, for health professionals using the DSM5 — most of them not psychiatrists, but primary care doctors — to begin diagnosing mild neurocognitive disorder? Particularly as there is no treatment that can reverse it or reliably slow its progression, if it would progress?

Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and a member of the working group that developed the new DSM5 criteria, said he thought the newly recognized disorder would be useful. “The predementia phase is becoming increasingly important,” he told me in an interview.

Counseling could help people compensate for the memory loss and other deficits they are experiencing, for example. With a D.S.M.-recognized diagnosis, those approaches are more likely to be covered by insurers.

Besides, “one argument against Alzheimer’s therapies is that we wait too late, when there’s too much damage to the central nervous system to repair,” Dr. Petersen said, referring to several recent disappointing drug trials. In the future, with earlier diagnoses, “you may be able to intervene, stop the process and forestall the dementia.”

But as we have seen with screening tests for other diseases, early detection does not always lead to better health or longer lives. It can, however, lead to unnecessary treatments and procedures involving risks of their own. Could that happen with mild neurocognitive disorder?

“It will lead to wild overdiagnosis,” predicted Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke and the chairman of the task force that developed the previous D.S.M. edition. Indeed, about a quarter of people initially diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment are later determined to be normal, a prominent researcher told my colleague Judith Graham last year.

“People will get unnecessary tests and start getting weird treatments that have no proven efficacy,” said Dr. Frances, who has criticized a number of DSM5 changes. “They’re going to worry like crazy about being demented.”

Dr. Petersen agreed that it was a legitimate concern, but “by and large, we’re becoming better at distinguishing between the normal cognitive effects of aging and disease.” (The American Psychiatric Association will publish a specialized D.S.M. for primary care physicians, Dr. Kupfer pointed out, to help guide them through diagnoses.)

It is hard for patients and families to know how to react when experts disagree. But keep in mind that contemporary health care aims for what is called shared decision-making. That means patients and professionals discuss options and weigh the risks and benefits of treatments and procedures, their likely outcomes, patients’ preferences, and come to agreement on how to proceed. This essay in the New England Journal of Medicine calls shared decision-making “the pinnacle of patient-centered care.”

So when Dr. Frances refers to the DSM5 as “a guide, not a bible,” and urges skepticism about some of its diagnoses, he is advocating an approach that patients and families should probably bring to any medical decision.

Seeking further information, asking questions, assessing options — those are reasonable responses if, a few weeks after a loved one’s death, a doctor says you may have major depression. Or if she thinks your memory loss could mean mild neurocognitive disorder.

“The shorter the evaluation, the less the person knows you, the less he or she can explain and justify the diagnosis, the more tests and treatments that will result, the more a person should be cautious and get a second opinion,” Dr. Frances said.

Whatever the DSM5 says, it’s hard to argue with that.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Stocks Push Higher


Stock climbed in New York on Friday, buoyed by rosy earnings from Procter & Gamble amid a backdrop of sturdy corporate results.


The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index climbed 0.3 percent in early trading. The S.&P. 500 was poised for an eighth day of gains, its longest winning streak in eight years. The Dow Jones industrial average added 0.2 percent and the Nasdaq rose 0.3 percent.


The equity market was also boosted by agreement in Washington to extend the government’s borrowing power through mid-May, encouraging signs of recovery in the global economy, solid corporate earnings, and seasonal inflows into stocks.


Those factors helped the S.&P. 500 rally for a seventh day on Thursday to a five-year peak. Still, the index struggled to climb convincingly above 1,500, a level it surpassed briefly Thursday for the first time since December 2007.


“We are seeing a very broad-based rally, and the ingredients are still in place” for gains to continue, said Steve Goldman, principal at Goldman Management in Short Hills, N.J. “This is the lift-off phase and it’s still significant.”


Procter & Gamble, the world’s top household products maker, said quarterly profit soared past expectations and raised its sales and earnings outlook for the fiscal year. Shares were up 2.1 percent.


Pointing to a rotation out of bonds, 30-year Treasury bonds traded more than a point lower in price on Friday, with yields touching session highs at 3.10 percent.


“You have had more confidence from fund managers to provide more allocations to equity markets,” which looked more attractive than bonds or cash, said Rick Meckler, president of investment firm LibertyView Capital Management.


Recent company earnings have been encouraging. Thomson Reuters data through early Thursday showed that of the 133 S.&P. 500 companies that have reported earnings so far, 66.9 percent exceeded expectations, more than the 65 percent average over the past four quarters.


German business morale improved for a third consecutive month in January to its highest in more than half a year, but Britain’s economy shrank 0.3 percent at the end of 2012, pushing it perilously close to slipping into recession for a third time since 2008.


European stock markets were up moderately. The DAX in Germany gained 1.3 percent and the CAC 40 in France added 0.6 percent.


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