ACCULTURATIVE STRESS AND IDENTITY NEGOTIATION: A DYADIC EXPERIENCE

Institutions of higher education in the United States have long been attractors for international students from all over the world. The number of international students had been constantly growing until the past couple of years. This is a concerning issue because international students play several important roles in higher education institutions. International students bring different points of view that enhance other students’ learning and institutions gain financial benefits from the presence of international students. Thus, it is important to understand how to improve the experience of international students. For the present study I used a phenomenological approach to explore the experiences of international students and their spouses. Participants in this study included 16.5 dyads from 12 different countries. The sample included both graduate international students and their spouses for various reasons. When studying acculturation, studies have traditionally focused on undergraduate students. The needs and experiences of undergraduate students are different from graduate students because they are usually in a different stage of life. It is also true that graduate students often relocate with their dependents, unlike undergraduate students, and therefore they have different challenges and responsibilities. It is important to include spouses because they are often an invisible population. Dependents have critical limitations such as the prohibition to work or study. This study was conducted through the lens of biographical disruption and participants’ accounts were analyzed to better understand the added communication work that they must manage. The findings showed that there was a relationship between acculturation categories and the amount and type of acculturation work. Finally, the study shows how international students and their dependents reconstruct their biographies by molding their identities. This study should be used to create new policies and services for international students and their dependents

Nurses' perceptions of aids and obstacles to the provision of optimal end of life care in ICU

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Common variants in the HLA-DQ region confer susceptibility to idiopathic achalasia

Idiopathic achalasia is characterized by a failure of the lower esophageal sphincter to relax due to a loss of neurons in the myenteric plexus. This ultimately leads to massive dilatation and an irreversibly impaired megaesophagus. We performed a genetic association study in 1,068 achalasia cases and 4,242 controls and fine-mapped a strong MHC association signal by imputing classical HLA haplotypes and amino acid polymorphisms. An eight-residue insertion at position 227-234 in the cytoplasmic tail of HLA-DQβ1 (encoded by HLA-DQB1*05:03 and HLA-DQB1*06:01) confers the strongest risk for achalasia (P = 1.73 × 10(-19)). In addition, two amino acid substitutions in the extracellular domain of HLA-DQα1 at position 41 (lysine encoded by HLA-DQA1*01:03; P = 5.60 × 10(-10)) and of HLA-DQβ1 at position 45 (glutamic acid encoded by HLA-DQB1*03:01 and HLA-DQB1*03:04; P = 1.20 × 10(-9)) independently confer achalasia risk. Our study implies that immune-mediated processes are involved in the pathophysiology of achalasia