Premedical program effective in increasing admissions to health professional schools.

The Special Premedical Studies Program (SPSP) has been successful in preparing Aboriginal students in Canada for admission to medicine, dentistry, medical rehabilitation, and pharmacy at the University of Manitoba. The success rate for admission to these faculties is 20%. There is a higher failure rate in the basic years of medical/dental education, but remediation has been 100% successful. Failure rates in the clinical years do not differ from those of the mainstream population. Grade point averages and MCAT scores are given less weight in the special consideration category of application at the University of Manitoba. SPSP students can and do apply to this category. The higher rate of first unsuccessful attempt in the basic years of medical education specifically can be attributed to a variety of factors, including reading skills. Although the numbers are small, we show that there is a correlation between the comprehension score of the Nelson-Denny test and the verbal score of MCAT. But there was no difference on the average between verbal score in MCAT and pass/fail in basic medical years. Students who scored above the 80th percentile on the comprehension portion of the Nelson-Denny test were successful in their first attempt at examinations in medical school.

Role of cervicovaginal antibody in the pathogenesis of recurrent urinary tract infection in women.

Introital colonization with Enterobacteriaceae is considered to be one of the principal predisposing factors to recurrent urinary tract infections (UTI) in adult females. One proposed mechanism allowing introital colonization in these patients is the absence of local cervicovaginal antibody. To test this hypothesis, we examined cervicovaginal washings from 22 patients with a history of recurrent UTI and 29 normal controls with no history of UTI for specific local antibody by using indirect immunofluorescence. No significant difference in antibody was found in these populations. Fourteen percent (3/22) of the patients had antibody to their introital Escherichia coli and 34% (10/29) of the controls had antibody to their fecal E. coli. Consequently, a sensitive radioimmunoassay technique was developed to detect cervicovaginal antibody. A solid phase was prepared by coupling to Sepharose 4B a pool of eight serogroups of E. coli which are frequently implicated in UTI. Serial dilutions of cervicovaginal washings were reacted with the solid phase, and the absorbed anti-E. coli antibodies were detected by the uptake of (125)I-labeled anti-human immunoglobulin G (IgG) or anti-human IgA. The antibody levels were quantitated by interpolation on a standard curve prepared by using immunospecifically purified human anti-E. coli antibodies. IgG and IgA levels were measured in washings from 10 colonized patients, 13 non-colonized patients, and 12 controls. There were no significant differences in IgG and IgA levels in cervicovaginal washings among the three groups. In these studies, introital colonization was not related to cervicovaginal antibody.