[Results of the ABC ' buddy project' whereby students were paid to befriend worryingly inactive youngsters with a psychotic disorder]. / Betaalde vriendendienst bij zorgwekkend inactieve jongeren met een psychotische stoornis; een vergelijkend onderzoek naar het ABC-buddyproject.

BACKGROUND: Psychology students ('buddies’) could earn € 25,- by visiting a patient, on one afternoon or evening per week, in order to provide friendship and engage the patient in a joint activity. An additional sum of € 20,- was made available to finance the joint activity. AIM: To find out whether this activity and social participation of patients who had a buddy increased more than in patients without a buddy. METHOD: In a quasi-experimental study 28 young, worryingly inactive patients who had a buddy were matched individually with patients without a buddy. Measurements were taken prior to the buddy contacts and after a period of 18 months. General functioning was used as a secondary outcome measure, in addition to the measure of activities and social participation. RESULTS: No patients in either group showed any improvement in activity, participation level and general functioning. CONCLUSION: Recruiting and paying buddies to befriend and stimulate worryingly inactive youngsters with a psychotic disorder did not increase the youngsters' activity, their social participation or their general functioning.

Societal participation: examining the impact of a rehabilitation approach for young people with schizophrenia.

This paper is based on research that focuses on the impact of a rehabilitation approach with respect to 99 young people diagnosed with schizophrenia in a Dutch mental health facility. The approach focused on societal participation goals. Nurses and social workers play a key role in such treatment. The research focused on developmental trajectories and showed significant improvement with respect to societal participation levels. Impairment scores remained stable. The results indicate that rehabilitation counselling by nurses and social workers, in addition to medication and psychosocial treatment and integrated in a multidisciplinary team, can make a difference in a patient's societal participation.

Immunohistochemical profiles of 30 monoclonal antibodies against cytokeratins 8, 18 and 19. Second report of the TD5 workshop.

In the first report of the TD5 workshop (TD5-1), the epitope specificities of 30 different monoclonal antibodies against cytokeratins 8, 18 and 19 were determined. This second report presents the immunohistochemical profiles of these antibodies using human appendix and normal skin for evaluation. Each antibody was tested by one or two different laboratories recruited from the Dutch Working Group on Immunohistochemistry and Cytochemistry. Eight different laboratories participated. The histological specimens were pretreated by the participants in three different ways for immunohistochemistry: microwave antigen retrieval in citrate buffer, enzymatic digestion to restore epitope exposure, no specific treatment (untreated paraffin-embedded samples), and tested blindly without knowledge of cytokeratin or epitope specificity of the antibodies at three different concentrations of 50, 10 and 1 microg/ml. Most of the tested antibodies (29/30) were useful in at least one pretreatment method, with microwave antigen retrieval being the most sensitive approach. For some antibodies, very high backgrounds were observed. Furthermore, it can be concluded that 11 MAbs performed well using all three staining protocols, including untreated paraffin-embedded sections. Interestingly, all the antibodies with documented selected specificity towards cytokeratin 8 (i.e. 178, 191, 199, 202 and 206) are reactive with an immunodominant region corresponding to amino acids 340-365 on cytokeratin 8, which evidently is well-suited as target for immunohistochemical interactions. Similarly, three antibodies with the same capacity to react with untreated samples had specificity against cytokeratin 19 (i.e. 179, 197 and 204) in the corresponding region in this filament, i.e. amino acids 311-335, or the KS 19.1 epitope. None of the six antibodies against the other major cytokeratin 19 epitope (BM 19.21) were found useful for immunohistochemistry on untreated samples. The overall conclusions from the present investigation are that all cytokeratin-8-specific antibodies with defined epitope specificities were very useful. Only one of the major two epitopes on cytokeratin 19 seems to be available for efficient immunohistochemistry. Cytokeratin 18 exposes some epitopes outside the immunodominant region reactive with the antibodies 190, 203 and 205 which can be used for untreated samples. The implications of these findings are of significance both for diagnostic histopathology and for the biology of tumor marker epitope expression in tissues.