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. ____________

Elucidating the Genetic Basis of Neurological Disorders in Pakistani Population

Human brain development is a complex process involving many cellular pathways. Pathogenic mutations in genes controlling as a whole or in parts, any of these cellular processes result in neurological disorders. It is basically due to defective signaling function in central or peripheral nervous system. The clinical features of such disorders are extremely diverse and overlapping, with even greater genetic heterogeneity. They may either be simple, having Mendelian inheritance or they may be complex. Genetic factors play very important role both in simple and complex neurological diseases. The consequences of such diseases are usually devastating both for affected individuals, their families and society, mainly by affecting the qualities which make human special as person; the character, memory, cognition, communication and skilled movements. In the present study, 11 consanguineous Pakistani families having neurological disorders of Mendelian inheritance were investigated using next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. Rare and disease causing variants mostly occur in coding part of genome. Whole exome sequencing (WES) was used as a method of choice in the current study because of the heterogeneous nature of neurological disorders both clinically and genetically. Variants obtained from WES were prioritized based on their inheritance pattern, disease association, functional relevance and pathogenicity score as predicted by different bioinformatics tools such as Mutation Taster and PolyPhen-2. Segregation of all the variants were confirmed using Sanger sequencing. Ten novel and one already reported mutation were identified in this study. At present there are no effective treatment strategies available for most of these diseases. Therefore, identification of gene/s and pathogenic variant/s in these diseases will help understand underlying molecular mechanisms better, and lead to improved strategies both for genetic counseling and potential therapeutics