Three-Year Longitudinal Follow-up of the Psychiatry Early Experience Program (PEEP): Gaining and Sustaining Positive Attitudes Towards Psychiatry in Students at a UK Medical School.

Objective: The Psychiatry Early Experience Programme (PEEP) is a novel enrichment activity at Kings College London medical school. Throughout their five-year degree, students shadow trainee psychiatry doctors. The study aimed to evaluate whether more regular early exposure affects attitudes towards psychiatry.

Videokeratographic anomalies in familial keratoconus.

Objective: To analyze videokeratography of relatives of established familial keratoconus (FK) patients to detect low-expressivity keratoconus and improve the diagnosis criteria of forme fruste keratoconus.

Design: Multicenter case-control study.

Participants: Twenty-three families with 55 clinical keratoconus patients, 89 first-degree relatives, 43 other relatives, and a control group of 130 subjects.

Extracellular matrix-bound vascular endothelial growth factor promotes endothelial cell adhesion, migration, and survival through integrin ligation.

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a major factor mediating endothelial cell survival, migration, and proliferation during angiogenesis, is expressed as five splice variants (121, 145, 165, 189, and 206 aminoacids) encoded by a single gene. Although the three shorter isoforms are mainly diffusible, the two longer ones are sequestered in cell membranes after secretion. However, their potential role as true components of the extracellular matrix has not been investigated.

Pigment epithelium-derived factor exerts opposite effects on endothelial cells of different phenotypes.

The anti-angiogenic activity of pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF) has recently been discovered on the basis of its inhibition of ischemia-induced retinal neovascularization in an animal model of retinopathy of the premature. Moreover PEDF inhibits the migration and proliferation of various endothelial cells maintained in culture with FGF(2). Since vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is the main angiogenic factor expressed in hypervascularized retinas, we investigated the functions of PEDF on retinal endothelial cells whose angiogenic phenotype is controlled or not by long term exposure to VEGF as observed in human pathologies such as diabetic retinopathy.