A Study of Stress Factors and Their Impact on Students’ Academic Performance at University Level

The main emphasis of the study is on the academic performance and the stress management in applied science among the students of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Sindh University Campus Dadu. What is the level of stress on the academic success of the students? How does it affect their lifestyle and health? This is what the research study covers to counteract the general stress among the students. The purpose of the study is to inquire and bring light to measure and check the present stress among students of the university. While doing the research a quantitative method was applied for collecting and analyzing the data. The Questionnaires were distributed among different students for this purpose. Innumerable factors of stress were found in the results and the factors were grouped in four categories which are; -Environmental Factors, Academic Factors, and Personal Factors. In environmental factors, the stress was about the happening the fate in the future. The students were found worried about future that what would happen about their fate? How it will happen? What is about to happen? When they came into contact with the new people it raised their stress. Also the class workload was the main reason for the stress among the students regarding academic factors. When the students were experiencing the workload of the class the group of the students came under stress. The last factor was a personal factor which was mainly due to the financial problem among the students. The stress of all categories can be managed through stress management courses and doing different extracurricular activities which will help to divert the attention of the students on different occasions. This study has drawn significant conclusions and Suggests further measures for practitioners which could help other to manage stress. The limitations are also mentioned so that those who are conducting research for the similar cases can extract better results and ways of curbing stress. A survey questionnaire was designed to collect the response from students, the five-point Likert scale was used from strongly agree to strongly disagree. SPSS-21 version was used to interpret the results through different quantitative techniques like descriptive, regression, and correlation. ____________

Development of Food Grade Colloidal System for Delivery of Vitamin a and D

Nutritional deficiency of vitamin A and D is causing a lot of problems in the world. It is estimated that about one billion people worldwide are either vitamin D deficient or have insufficient vitamin D intake. In Pakistan about 85% of both pregnant and non-pregnant mothers have been found vitamin D deficient. Apart from this, 5.7 million children below 5 years of age and 42.5 % women were identified as vitamin A deficient in Pakistan. Being food fortification or supplementation a best approach, the food manufacturers are interested in fortifying their products with vitamin A and D. As both vitamins are restricted to fats and oils due to their non-solubility in water. Nanoemulsions are ideal solution to address this problem because this technique enhances the solubility, kinetic stability, bio efficacy and bioavailability of encapsulated material due to their smaller size. The purpose of present study was to fortify beverages with nanoemulsions of vitamin A and D. The nanoemulsions were prepared by using food grade surfactants (Tween 80 and soya lecithin), deionized water and vegetable oil (olive and canola oil). Preparation conditions for beta carotene and vitamin D nanoemulsions were optimized using response surface methodology. These nanoemulsions were further characterized against different physico-chemical parameters. In vivo study was carried out on animal model to investigate the safety of nanoemulsions. The nanoemulsions based delivery system was used to fortify the beverages with these vitamins. The results manifested that, ideal optimum preparation conditions for beta carotene nanoemulsions were 6.07% surfactant, 4.19 minutes homogenization time and 6.50% oil contents. For vitamin D nanoemulsions, optimum preparation conditions were 4.82 minutes xxii xxii homogenization time, 0.67 surfactant to oil ratio (S/O) and 7% disperse phase volume. During two months of storage studies, these nanoemulsions remained stable against phase separation and creaming. Moreover, droplet size of nanoemulsions stored at 4 °C slowly increased as compared to nanoemulsions stored at 25 °C. Additionally, p-Anisidine value of the vegetable oil (canola and olive oil) incorporated into nanoemulsions were significantly lower as compared to free vegetable oil. These nanoemulsions were stable against droplet aggregation and phase separation over a wide range of pH (2-8), salt concentration (50-400 mM) and temperature (30-80°C). During toxicity study, bi-nuclear assay, multinuclear assay and comet assay did not showed any toxic effect of nanoemulsions on animal models. During last part of study, vitamin beta carotene and vitamin D fortified model beverages was developed successfully. Hence, nanoemulsions based delivery system can be used for fortification of aqueous products with fat soluble vitamins and other nutraceutical compounds.