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The US population of immigrants and refugees has steadily increased, as have efforts to curtail their numbers via detention and deportation. Critically, forensic evaluations for immigration courts have reflected a burgeoning specialty of both empirical scholarship and professional practice. In recognizing the growing role of forensic practitioners in immigration-related evaluations, the current article examines legal and professional issues facing the field. Specifically, the empirical landscape regarding "immigration trauma" is introduced as a salient backdrop to all other professional issues. Building on this framework, advancements and developing areas of empirical work concerning these specialized evaluations are reviewed. Moreover, this article has examined recently established guidelines and ethical considerations informing immigration evaluations. To illustrate, a substantive analysis of competency in immigration proceedings highlights salient similarities and crucial distinctions between due process rights in criminal and civil courts. Concluding remarks highlight salient future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to understand the learning outcomes of students who participate in interdisciplinary hands-on advanced technology courses and the factors influencing their outcomes as well as to determine whether learning outcomes and cognitive development are affected by students' motivation for selecting the course with regard to their learning abilities. The subjects of this study are students who were enrolled in interdisciplinary advanced technology courses at a university located in Northern Taiwan from 2020 to 2021. We recruited 171 students to complete measures of their motivation for selecting the course and to complete a prelearning outcome scale during the first week; a learning abilities scale was completed during the ninth week; and a postlearning outcomes scale was completed during the sixteenth week. We recruited 96 students to participate in interviews after they completed the course to determine their cognitive development. The results showed that participants' average learning outcomes scores on the posttest were significantly higher than those on the pretest. After students participated in the course, 66.7% of them were in the "Apply" stage, indicating they could apply the knowledge they learned to other situations, while 25% were in the "Analyze" stage, indicating they could deconstruct the course knowledge based on its structure and understand the correlations among various items of course knowledge. Participants' interdisciplinary abilities were found to mediate the relationship between their autonomous motivation and cognitive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Lower socioeconomic status is associated with excess disease burden from diabetes. Diabetes self-management support interventions are needed that are effective in engaging lower income patients, addressing competing life priorities and barriers to self-care, and facilitating behavior change.Objective: To pilot test feasibility, acceptability, and effect on disease control of a problem-based diabetes self-management training adapted for low literacy and accessibility.Design: Two-arm randomized controlled trial powered to detect a 0.50% change in A1C at follow-up with a 2-sided alpha of 0.05 in a pooled analysis.Participants: Fifty-six urban African-American patients with type 2 diabetes and suboptimal blood sugar, blood pressure, or cholesterol control recruited from a diabetes registry within a university-affiliated managed care organization.Interventions: A group, problem-based diabetes self-management training designed for delivery in an intensive and a condensed program format. Three intensive and three condensed program groups were conducted during the trial.Main Measures: Clinical (A1C, systolic blood pressure [SBP], diastolic blood pressure [DBP], LDL and HDL cholesterol) and behavioral (knowledge, problem solving, self-management behavior) data were measured at baseline, post-intervention, and 3 months post-intervention (corresponding with 6-9 months following baseline).Results: Adoption of both programs was high (>85% attendance rates, 95% retention). At 3 months post-intervention, the between-group difference in A1C change was -0.72% (p = 0.02), in favor of the intensive program. A1C reduction was partially mediated by problem-solving skill at follow-up (ß = -0.13, p = 0.04). Intensive program patients demonstrated within-group improvements in knowledge (p < 0.001), problem-solving (p = 0.01), and self-management behaviors (p = 0.04). Among the subsets of patients with suboptimal blood pressure or lipids at baseline, the intensive program yielded clinically significant individual improvements in SBP, DBP, and LDL cholesterol. Patient satisfaction and usability ratings were high for both programs.Conclusions: A literacy-adapted, intensive, problem-solving-based diabetes self-management training was effective for key clinical and behavioral outcomes in a lower income patient sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autophagy and apoptosis are two well-controlled mechanisms regulating cell fate. An understanding of decision-making between these two pathways is in its infancy. Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is a mitochondrial enzyme that is well-known in psychiatric research. Emerging reports showed that overexpression MAOA is associated with prostate cancer (PCa). Here, we show that MAOA is involved in mediating neuroendocrine differentiation of PCa cells, a feature associated with hormone-refractory PCa (HRPC), a lethal type of disease. Following recent reports showing that NED of PCa requires down-regulation of repressor element-1 silencing transcription factor (REST) and activation of autophagy; we observe that MAOA is a novel direct target gene of REST. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) produced by overexpressed MAOA plays an essential role in inhibiting apoptosis and activating autophagy in NED PCa cells. MAOA inhibitors significantly reduced NED and autophagy activation of PCa cells. Our results here show MAOA as a new decision-maker for activating autophagy and MAOA inhibitors may be useful as a potential therapy for neuroendocrine tumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Castration-resistance prostate cancer (CRPC), also known as hormone-refractory prostate cancer (HRPC), requires immediate attention since it is not only resistant to androgen ablation, chemo- and radiotherapy, but also highly metastatic. Increasing evidence suggests that enrichment of neuroendocrine (NE) cells is associated with CRPC. Here, combined RNA-seq and ChIP-seq analysis reveals that REST is involved in epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and stemness acquisition in NE differentiated prostate cancer (PCa) cells via direct transcriptional repression of Twist1 and CD44. Specifically we show that short-term knockdown of REST induces NE differentiation of LNCaP cells. Long-term REST knockdown enhanced the expression of Twist1 and CD44, cell migration and sphere formation. Overexpression of REST in hormone-refractory CWR22Rv1 PCa cells significantly reduces Twist1 and CD44 expression, cell migration and sphere formation. Collectively, our study uncovers REST in regulating EMT and stemness properties of NE PCa cells and suggests that REST is a potential therapeutic target for CRPC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cotadutide is a dual glucagon-like peptide 1 and glucagon receptor agonist under development for the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and chronic kidney disease. Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis is a complex disease with no approved pharmacotherapies, arising from an underlying state of systemic metabolic dysfunction in association with T2DM and obesity. Cotadutide has been shown to improve glycaemic control, body weight, lipids, liver fat, inflammation and fibrosis. We conducted a two-part, randomized phase 2a trial in men and women with overweight or obesity diagnosed with T2DM to evaluate the efficacy and safety of cotadutide compared with placebo and liraglutide. The primary endpoints were change from baseline to day 28 of treatment in postprandial hepatic glycogen (part A) and to day 35 of treatment in fasting hepatic glycogen (part B) with cotadutide versus placebo. Secondary endpoints in part B were changes in fasting hepatic glycogen with cotadutide versus the mono glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonist, liraglutide, and change in hepatic fat fraction. The trial met its primary endpoint. We showed that cotadutide promotes greater reductions in liver glycogen and fat compared with placebo and liraglutide. Safety and tolerability findings with cotadutide were comparable to those of previous reports. Thus, this work provides evidence of additional benefits of cotadutide that could be attributed to glucagon receptor engagement. Our results suggest that cotadutide acts on the glucagon receptor in the human liver to promote glycogenolysis and improve the metabolic health of the liver. ClinicalTrials.gov registration: NCT03555994 ., (© 2023. The Author(s).)