Online Lab: Blood Pressure

1. State a problem about the relationship of age and gender to blood pressure.

There are many different factors that go into blood pressure readings. In this lab there were 4 other variables other than male/female and age differences. Family History, High Salt Diet, No Exercise, and Alcohol consumption were those variables. There is also the weight and height factor. There are many other variables that go into blood pressure readings, but this gives you a good idea of what affects what.

2. Use your knowledge about the heart and the circulatory system to make a hypothesis about how the average blood pressure for a group of people would be affected by manipulating the age and gender of the group members.

The lower the blood pressure the more we could assume it is a younger female.

3. How will you use the investigation screen to test your hypothesis? What steps will you follow? What data will you record?

There are different age categories and they are divided between male and female. We will test 10 people in each category to get find an average. Such as. Male ages 11-17, 18-24,25-34, 35-44, 45-54. Females are broken up into the same age categories. We will test their blood pressures all at the same time so there isn't a discrepancy. The data that will be recorded are the individuals’ blood pressures along with height, weight, age, family history, if they have high salt diet, exercise or no exercise, and if they consume alcohol.

4. Analyze the result of your experiment. Explain any patterns you observed.

In the graph and the table you can see that females generally have lower blood pressures that males do. In the graph, the male systolic is represented by the pink line, and the diastolic is represented by the blue line. The female systolic is represented by the green line and the diastolic is represent by the orange line. In the table, you can see all the averages of the age/gender groups. The older people get the higher their blood pressures are. It seems that most of the males I tested had 2 or 3 different variables that contributed to their high blood pressures. Some were overweight (which we could probably tie to little or no exercise), some had high salt diets, and family history. The patterns that I observed from doing this exercise, family history has a lot to do with the high blood pressure of people.

5. Did the result of your experiment support your hypothesis? Why or why not? Based on your experiment what conclusion can you draw about the relationship of age and gender to group blood pressure averages?

The results from doing this test supported my hypothesis. Females generally have a lower blood pressure than males, and the younger people are, the lower their blood pressures are. The one interesting aspect of this experiment that I found was the average of females 11-17 was a little higher than that of 18-24(refer to the table). Overall though, females have lower blood pressure than males.

6. During the course of your experiment, did you obtain any blood pressure reading that were outside of the normal range for the group being tested? What did you notice on the medical charts for these individuals that might explain their high reading?

When I researched the individuals who had high blood pressure, they usually had more than one factor that contributed to their hypertension. Most of them had a higher weight than they should have. I also noticed that most of them didn’t exercise or had a high salt diet. Both of those factors contribute highly to hypertension.

7. List risk factors associated with the hypertension. Based on your observation, which risk factor do you think is most closely associated with hypertension?

There were quite a bit of people who had hypertension that had family history of hypertension. Weight, I think has a pretty big impact on hypertension. When I tested one male who was 47...he had no family history, he exercised, had a regular diet and was not overweight, so something else must contribute to his high blood pressure.

8. What effect might obesity have on blood pressure? Does obesity alone cause a person to be at risk for high blood pressure? What other factors, in combination with obesity, might increase a person's risk for high blood pressure?

I think obesity has a huge impact on high blood pressure, if a person is not exercising and has a horrible diet; they have a pretty high chance of having high blood pressure. I think obesity alone could have an impact on high blood pressure. Usually, people who are obese do not exercise on a regular basis therefore they aren't able to burn what they eat. If a person who is obese could exercise, then I would imagine their chance of high blood pressure could come down.