Interpersonal counselling for adolescent depression delivered by youth mental health workers without core professional training: the ICALM feasibility RCT.

Background: As milder cases of adolescent depression do not meet treatment thresholds for specialist mental health services, young people often receive support from non-qualified professionals in third-sector/voluntary agencies. Early psychological interventions to meet growing demand with limited resources are crucial.

Objectives: The study aimed to explore the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of interpersonal counselling for adolescents by (1) assessing the feasibility and acceptability of trial procedures; (2) exploring the delivery of, and differences between, interpersonal counselling for adolescents and treatment as usual; (3) evaluating the extent of contamination of the control arm and if it should be mitigated against in a future trial; and (4) investigating whether the interval estimate of benefit of interpersonal counselling for adolescents over treatment as usual in depression post treatment includes a clinically significant effect.

Doing research in non-specialist mental health services for children and young people: lessons learnt from a process evaluation of the ICALM (Interpersonal Counselling for Adolescent Low Mood) feasibility randomised controlled trial.

Background: The rising prevalence of adolescent mild depression in the UK and the paucity of evidence-based interventions in non-specialist sectors where most cases present, creates an urgent need for early psychological interventions. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are considered the gold standard for obtaining unbiased estimates of intervention effectiveness. However, the complexity of mental health settings poses great challenges for effectiveness evaluations.

Oral contrast enhances the resolution of in-life NIS reporter gene imaging.

Sodium iodide symporter (NIS) reporter gene imaging is an excellent technology for noninvasive cell fate determination in living animals unless the NIS-transduced cells reside in perigastric organs such as the spleen, liver, diaphragm, omentum, pancreas, perigastric lymph nodes or perigastric tumor deposits. Here we report that orally administered barium sulfate enhances CT definition of the stomach, masks background gamma ray emissions from the stomach and enhances signal detection from radiotracer uptake in NIS-transduced organs.

Efficacy and safety of Sleeping Beauty transposon-mediated gene transfer in preclinical animal studies.

Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposons have been effective in delivering therapeutic genes to treat certain diseases in mice. Hydrodynamic gene delivery of integrating transposons to 5-20% of the hepatocytes in a mouse results in persistent elevated expression of the therapeutic polypeptides that can be secreted into the blood for activity throughout the animal. An alternative route of delivery is ex vivo transformation with SB transposons of hematopoietic cells, which then can be reintroduced into the animal for treatment of cancer.