An exploration of on-line access by non-traditional students in higher education: a case study.

The nature of Higher Education (HE) has seen many changes throughout the last decade. The agenda for widening participation in HE has led to an increase in the number of students with a broader range of educational backgrounds. At the same time there has been a surge in the development of digitalisation and the convergence of computing and telecommunications technologies available for use in education.

Specialised care for early psychosis: symptoms, social functioning and patient satisfaction: randomised controlled trial.

Background: The provision of early intervention services for people with psychosis is UK government policy, although evidence for benefit of such services is sparse.

Aims: To evaluate the effects of a service providing specialised care for early psychosis (the Lambeth Early Onset Team) on clinical and social outcomes, and on service user satisfaction.

Method: One hundred and forty-four people with psychosis, presenting to mental health services for the first or second time (if previously failed to engage in treatment), were randomly allocated to care by the early onset team or to standard care.

Linkage analyses of IQ in the collaborative study on the genetics of alcoholism (COGA) sample.

Intelligence, as measured by standardized psychological tests, has been shown to be highly heritable, though identifying specific genes influencing general intelligence has proven difficult. We conducted genome-wide linkage analyses to identify chromosomal regions containing genes influencing intelligence, as measured by WAIS full-scale IQ (FSIQ), performance IQ (PIQ) and verbal IQ (VIQ). Non-parametric multipoint linkage analyses were conducted with Merlin-regress software, using a sample of 1,111 genotyped and phenotyped individuals from 201 families, ascertained as part of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA).

Event attributes and the content of psychotic experiences in first-episode psychosis.

Background: Previous psychosocial stress research, contemporary cognitive models, and new cognitive behavioural treatments for psychosis converge in suggesting that stressful events influence the content of psychotic experiences. In this paper we test whether the attributes of stressful events preceding the initial onset of psychosis are associated with core themes of the illness.

Method: Forty-one people who had experienced a first episode of psychosis were assessed on the attributes of stressful events occurring in the year before onset, the themes (persecutory, depressive, and grandiose) associated with their delusions and the content of their auditory hallucinations.

Some oral poliovirus vaccines were contaminated with infectious SV40 after 1961.

Some polio vaccines prepared from 1954 to 1961 were contaminated with infectious SV40. It has been assumed that all polio vaccines were SV40 free in the United States after 1961 and in other countries after 1962. Following a WHO requirement that was prompted by the detection of SV40 in some human tumors, we conducted a multilaboratory study to test for SV40 polio vaccines prepared after 1961.

Practice parameters for the surgical treatment of ulcerative colitis.

The American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons is dedicated to assuring high-quality patient care by advancing the science, prevention, and management of disorders and diseases of the colon, rectum, and anus. The Standards Committee is composed of Society members who are chosen because they have demonstrated expertise in the specialty of colon and rectal surgery. This committee was created to lead international efforts in defining quality care for conditions related to the colon, rectum, and anus.

Delusions and decision-making style: use of the Need for Closure Scale.

Clinicians and researchers have suggested that rapidity in belief formation, due to having a high 'need for closure' (NFC), may contribute to the acceptance of delusional explanations. The aim of the study is to determine whether NFC has such a direct link with delusions. A secondary aim is to examine if NFC is related to the delusion-associated reasoning process of 'jumping to conclusions'.

A pilot validation study of a new measure of activity in psychosis.

Background: Wing and Brown [Wing JK and Brown GW (1970) Institutionalism and schizophrenia: a comparative study of three mental health hospitals 1960-1968. Cambridge University Press, London] demonstrated a clear relationship between activity and clinical improvement, using time budget methodology with people with psychosis. However, existing time budget measures are demanding to complete, and simpler, check-box measures of activity rely on subjective frequency judgements and do not include the full range of activities in which an individual might be involved.

Estimating treatment effects from randomized clinical trials with noncompliance and loss to follow-up: the role of instrumental variable methods.

Perfectly implemented randomized clinical trials, particularly of complex interventions, are extremely rare. Almost always they are characterized by imperfect adherence to the randomly allocated treatment and variable amounts of missing outcome data. Here we start by describing a wide variety of examples and then introduce instrumental variable methods for the analysis of such trials.

Does age acquired immunity confer selective protection to common serotypes of Campylobacter jejuni?

Background: Campylobacter infection is a major cause of bacterial gastrointestinal disease. Exposure to Campylobacter is known to produce an immune response in humans that can prevent future symptomatic infections. Further, studies of the general population have shown that seroprevalence to Campylobacter increases with age.

Reasoning, emotions, and delusional conviction in psychosis.

The aim of the study was to elucidate the factors contributing to the severity and persistence of delusional conviction. One hundred participants with current delusions, recruited for a treatment trial of psychological therapy (PRP trial), were assessed at baseline on measures of reasoning, emotions, and dimensions of delusional experience. Reasoning biases (belief inflexibility, jumping to conclusions, and extreme responding) were found to be present in one half of the sample.

Interferon-gamma and cancer immunoediting.

Over the last 12 yr, we have shown that interferon-gamma and lymphocytes collaborate to regulate tumor development in mice. Specifically, we found that the immune system not only prevents the growth of primary (carcinogen-induced and spontaneous) and transplanted tumors but also sculpts the immunogenicity of tumors that form. These observations led us to refine the old and controversial "cancer immunosurveillance" hypothesis of Burnet and Thomas into one that we termed cancer immunoediting that better emphasizes the paradoxical host-protective and tumor-sculpting roles of immunity on developing tumors.

Trauma and hallucinatory experience in psychosis.

Recent research indicates that there may be phenomenological, symptom, and diagnostic associations between trauma and hallucinations. However, the nature of the relationship is poorly understood from a psychological perspective. We report a theoretically informed phenomenological study.

A critical function for type I interferons in cancer immunoediting.

'Cancer immunoediting' is a process wherein the immune system protects hosts against tumor development and facilitates outgrowth of tumors with reduced immunogenicity. Although interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) is known to be involved in this process, the involvement of type I interferons (IFN-alpha/beta) has not been elucidated. We now show that, like IFN-gamma, endogenously produced IFN-alpha/beta was required for the prevention of the growth of primary carcinogen-induced and transplantable tumors.

A prospective double-blind randomized controlled trial of the effect of topical bupivacaine on post-operative pain in bilateral nasal surgery with bilateral nasal packs inserted.

To ascertain whether local anaesthetic use is of clinical benefit in nasal surgery, a prospective double-blind randomized controlled trial of topical bupivacaine on post-operative pain in patients packed after bilateral nasal surgery was carried out. Each patient received a bupivacaine-soaked and a saline-soaked Merocel pack, thereby acting as their own control. Power analysis ascertained the number of patients required to enter the trial to detect a statistically significant difference in pain.

Practice parameters for the treatment of perianal abscess and fistula-in-ano (revised).

The American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons is dedicated to assuring high-quality patient care by advancing the science, prevention, and management of disorders and diseases of the colon, rectum, and anus. The Standards Committee is composed of Society members who are chosen because they have demonstrated expertise in the specialty of colon and rectal surgery. This Committee was created to lead international efforts in defining quality care for conditions related to the colon, rectum, and anus.

The psychology of persecutory ideation II: a virtual reality experimental study.

A cognitive model of persecutory delusions is used to predict the occurrence of nonclinical paranoid thoughts in a virtual reality environment. Scorers across the range of paranoia entered a virtual reality scene populated by five computer characters programmed to behave neutrally (N = 30). Many appraisals of the computer characters were positive or neutral.

The psychology of persecutory ideation I: a questionnaire survey.

Paranoia is a complex phenomenon that is likely to arise from a number of factors. In a recent cognitive model of persecutory delusions, three key factors are highlighted: anomalous experiences, emotion, and reasoning. In the first of two linked studies, we report a questionnaire survey of nonclinical paranoia designed to assess the theoretical model.

Psychological investigation of the structure of paranoia in a non-clinical population.

Background: Previous studies of paranoia have assessed only limited numbers of paranoid thoughts, and have not considered the experience from a multidimensional perspective or examined the relationship between different suspicious thoughts.

Aims: To assess a wide range of paranoid thoughts multidimensionally and examine their distribution, to identify the associated coping strategies and to examine social-cognitive processes and paranoia.

Method: Six questionnaire assessments were completed by 1202 individuals using the internet.

Surgery and palliative medicine: new horizons.

Despite important early contributions by individual surgeons to the hospice movement, the recent relationship between palliative medicine and surgery has been distant. The paucity of contributions from the surgical literature on palliative care and the lack of familiarity with surgical illness by palliative care practitioners signals a lack of preparation necessary to address many of the issues presented by chronic, incurable surgical illnesses. Remediation of this problem is possible through a planned, sequential program of interdisciplinary effort.

IFN unresponsiveness in LNCaP cells due to the lack of JAK1 gene expression.

We reported previously that 23% of human lung adenocarcinoma cell lines were unresponsive to IFN-gamma. To extend this finding to cancer cells derived from distinct tissues of origin, we assessed IFN-gamma receptor signaling in the LNCaP human prostate adenocarcinoma cell line, which in previous experiments by others failed to induce a range of IFN-dependent biological responses. In this report, we show that LNCaP cells fail to respond to either IFN-gamma or IFN-alpha because of an impairment in the proximal signaling events downstream of both IFN-gamma and IFN-alpha/beta receptors that lead to the activation of STAT1.

Transplantation and palliative care: the convergence of two seemingly opposite realities.

One of the authors once asked a great transplant surgeon what came to his mind when asked about palliative care. He had two answers: the first,was somewhat simplistic; the second was profound. He said that this type of service was helpful in the ICU when there was not much more to be done surgically for a patient who was dying; the second, was a story about an individual whom he had transplanted three times (who survived!) because he and his team did not want the patient and family to give up hope.

Surgical palliative care: an enduring framework for surgical care.

Thomas R. Russell [49], Executive Director of the ACS pointed out ina recent editorial that the culture of surgery is changing and evolving, along with long-held values. He notes, "No longer is it 'my' patient, but it is 'our'patient.