The One-Stop Aortic Surveillance Clinic.

BACKGROUND: The principle of interval ultrasound surveillance of small abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) is well established. The fundamental principle of surveillance is that repair of AAA is a serious undertaking and the risk of the operation outweighs the risk of rupture in aneurysms less than 5.5 cm. Surveillance is well established but requires multiple visits to both the surgical clinic and the ultrasound department. REPORT: This report presents a system whereby the vascular surgeon is trained in the process of aortic sonography with a view to one-stop clinic assessment. After training of the main investigators in aortic sonography, the surgeons performed scans on the aortas of 80 consecutive patients and compared the scan result with the subsequent formal scan. DISCUSSION: Surgical and radiographer scans correlate very closely. It is believed that the one-stop aortic surveillance model is safe, accurate, and improves both the patient journey and clinic throughput.

Social perception in people with eating disorders.

OBJECTIVE: Social perception is a key aspect of social cognition which has so far not been investigated in eating disorders (ED). This study aimed to investigate social perception in individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). METHODS: Outpatients with AN (restricting subtype [AN-R]: n=51; binge-purge subtype [AN-BP]: n=26) or BN (n=57) and 50 healthy control (HC) participants completed the Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT-15). This is an ecologically valid task, which consists of 15 video clips, depicting complex social situations relating to intimacy, status, kinship, competition and deception. The participants have to assess relationships between protagonists' based on non-verbal cues. RESULTS: Overall, there was no difference between groups on the IPT total score and subscale scores. Group differences on the Intimacy subscale approached significance so post hoc comparisons were carried out. HCs performed significantly better than AN-R participants in determining the degree of intimacy between others. CONCLUSIONS: Social perception is largely preserved in ED patients. Individuals with AN-R show impairments in identifying intimacy in social situations, this may be due to the lack of relationship experience. Further research into different aspects of social cognition is required to establish the link between interpersonal difficulties and ED psychopathology.

Immunocytochemical evidence for gastric proteases in adenocarcinoma of the stomach.

When anti-sera to bovine pepsinogen and chymosin (rennin) was used, immunoreactive tumor cells were found in 12 of 23 gastric adenocarcinomas irrespective of the tumor subtype, degree of differentiation, or the presence or absence of intestinal metaplasia in the adjacent gastric mucosa. Nine of ten lymph node metastases contained immunoreactive tumor cells. Except for focal positively staining acini in Brunner's glands the antibodies did not stain normal small intestine or areas of intestinal metaplasia. Although intestinal metaplasia is a predisposing factor in gastric carcinoma it may be irrelevant to its histogenesis and differentiation. Instead, the mucus neck cells, being the stem cells of the normal gastric mucosa, may be the target of malignant transformation in gastric carcinoma.