Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1993

championship held on 19th September this year, the CUHK men's team beat its Hong Kong University counterpart in the coxed eight 4,500-metre race for the third time in three consecutive years and would keep the Pocari Cup permanently. The women's team also achieved its fourth successive victory in the coxed four 1,500-metre race. The mixed team defeated all opponents in the second Inter-postsecondary School Students Invitation Race and was awarded the Hang Seng Invitation Cup for the second time. Another Surgical Feat by University Doctors On 28th May, a team o f doctors from the Faculty of Medicine set new records in the medical history of Hong Kong. They performed the first ever liver transplantation for a child. It was the first reduced- sized liver transplantation in Hong Kong. It was also the territory's first live-related liver transplantation. The operation involved the removal of part of a healthy man's liver, tailoring the liver graft to suit the needs of his three-year-old daughter, removing the child's diseased liver, and transplanting the father's liver graft to the child. It was a major surgical operation, technically extremely difficult because it involved four to five meticulous anastomoses as well as other metabolic and haemostatic problems. As the patient was a child, her frailty and small size pose d additional difficulties. Surgeons had to operate under enormous tension and employ the use of optical magnification equipment during the process. The successful completion of the operatio n marks a new era of paediatric hepatobiliary surgery in Hong Kong. It offers a solution to the lack of liver donors for children with terminal liver diseases. Survey on Mental Illness The University's Psychiatric Epidemiology Research Unit in the Department of Psychiatry recently completed a large-scale community survey of adult psychiatric morbidity in the Sha Tin district. Conducted between 1984 and 1986, the project represents the first large-scale community survey of mental illness in Hong Kong. More than 10,000 households in Sha Tin were interviewed, and researchers spent six years to analyse the data collected. Research results show that one in every five people in Hong Kong suffers from some form of mental illness in his life time. While the incidence of mental problems is more or less the same among men and women, men aremore prone to behavioural problems such as tobacco dependence and alcohol abuse, whereas women are more vulnerable to emotional illnesses such as generalized anxiety, phobias, and depression. In comparison with similar research conducted in the West, Chinese subjects seem to suffer less from chronic psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychoses. This might be a result of the influence of traditional Chinese culture, which discourages extreme individualism and emphasizes family support and harmony in interpersonal relationships. The study urges the government to improve mental health services for the public, and to divert more resources to the training in psychiatry of general practitioners in Hong Kong . News in Brief 40