An observational study to evaluate three pilot programmes of retesting chlamydia-positive individuals within 6†months in the South West of England.

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate 3 pilot chlamydia retesting programmes in South West England which were initiated prior to the release of new National Chlamydia Screening Programme (NCSP) guidelines recommending retesting in 2014. METHODS: Individuals testing positive between August 2012 and July 2013 in Bristol (n=346), Cornwall (n=252) and Dorset (n=180) programmes were eligible for inclusion in the retesting pilots. The primary outcomes were retest within 6 months (yes/no) and repeat diagnosis at retest (yes/no), adjusted for area, age and gender. RESULTS: Overall 303/778 (39.0%) of participants were retested within 6 months and 31/299 (10.4%) were positive at retest. Females were more likely to retest than males and Dorset had higher retesting rates than the other areas. CONCLUSIONS: More than a third of those eligible were retested within the time frame of the study. Chlamydia retesting programmes appear feasible within the context of current programmes to identify individuals at continued risk of infection with relatively low resource and time input.

Orienting neurite growth in electrospun fibrous neural conduits.

In cases where direct suture of two nerve stumps is not feasible, generally a scaffold is required to bridge the gap and guide nerve regeneration. The scaffold used in nerve tissue engineering applications requires optimal guidance effect, mechanical strength, and cellular compatibility. A number of studies suggest that fibrous scaffolds can potentially be used for nerve regeneration, as the aligned fibers can provide the guidance effect for axonal growth and the fibrous structure mimics the nerve microenvironment. A practical method to fabricate the fibrous nerve conduit with structural guidance cue for neurite growth will improve its potential application in neural tissue engineering. In this study, fibrous tubular scaffolds were fabricated using an electrospinning technique. The fibrous conduit was composed of aligned fibers in the interior layer and randomly oriented fibers in the exterior layer. In order to investigate the fiber diameter on neurite extension and directional growth, fibers with different diameter in the subcellular size range were fabricated and the neurite growth on these fibers was investigated. We observed that PC12 cells' neurites showed similar parallel growth on the aligned fibers irrespective of fiber diameter. Neurite length on aligned fibers, with fiber diameters of 3.7 +/- 0.5 microm and 5.9 +/- 0.9 microm, was significantly longer than neurite length on randomly oriented fibers. This study showed that electrospinning provides a practical solution to fabricate fibrous nerve conduit by controlling the conduit inner diameter and fiber alignment and, hence, potentially improves the application of the conduit in neural regeneration.