LSV surgery leads to a significant improvement in disease-specific HRQoL for as much as 2 years. In patients without DVR, stripping to the knee confers additional benefit.

Patients with CVU have a 41% prevalence rate of thrombophilia. This rate is two to 30 times higher than the rate of the general population but is similar to that reported for patients with previous DVT. However, in patients with CVU, thrombophilia does not appear to be related to a history of DVT, a pattern of reflux, or severity of disease. Many patients with CVU may have unsuspected postthrombotic disease.

UKCAT scores did not predict Year 1 performance at the two medical schools. Although early prediction is arguably not the primary aim of the UKCAT, there is some cause for concern that the test failed to show even the small-to-moderate predictive power demonstrated by similar admissions tools.

Background: Intervention may help weaker medical students improve their performance. However, the effectiveness of remedial intervention is inconclusive due to small sample sizes in previous studies. We asked: is remedial intervention linked to a formative assessment effective in terms of improving student performance in subsequent degree examinations? Methods: This was a retrospective, observational study of anonymous databases of student assessment outcomes. Data were analysed for students due to graduate in the years 2005-2009 (n ¼ 909). Exam performance was compared for students who received remediation versus those who did not. The main outcome measure was summative degree examination marks. Results: After adjusting for cohort, gender, overseas versus home funding, previous degree and previous performance in the corresponding baseline third year summative exam, students receiving a remedial intervention (after poor performance on a formative objective structured clinical examination and written exams mid-fourth year) were significantly more likely to obtain an improved mark on end-of-fourth year summative written ( p ¼ 0.005) and OSCE ( p ¼ 0.001) exams compared to those students who did not receive remediation. Conclusion: A remedial intervention linked to poor assessment performance predicted improved performance in later examination. There is a need for prospective studies in order to identify the effective components of remedial interventions.

In this unselected series, saphenous surgery with or without subfascial endoscopic perforator surgery led to an improvement in disease-specific QoL in 87% of patients out to 2 years. Although univariate analysis results suggested that many baseline factors might be associated with outcome, multivariate analysis results suggested that only surgery for recurrent disease and for CEAP 4/5 disease remained as significant negative, and only long saphenous surgery as significant positive, independent prognostic factors. These data provide evidence of the medium-term clinical effectiveness of venous surgery across the full spectrum of CEAP clinical grades, show the importance of multivariate analysis, and reemphasize the importance of minimization of recurrence.