Blood Pressure Lab

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

At younger ages, both males and females have about the same problems where weight and family history have a higher effect on their blood pressure. As they age, the problems with blood pressure increase drastically with being over weight, consuming alcohol, and having a lot of salt in their diets.

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.

As people age, their blood pressure would get worse due to bad diets, plaque build up on the heart, and large amounts of salt.

3. How will you use the investigation screen to test your hypothesis? What steps will you follow? What data will you record?
Each age group changes the amount of blood pressure problems, and it would be important to record what different factors show up more often then others. I would record data like different family history or personal diets.

4. Analyze the result of your experiment. Explain any patterns you observed.
As the men and women age, their blood pressure does show more problems all around. There was only one man who seemed to be health but still had dangerously high blood pressure. There were similarities between the men and women on the fact that there was fairly equal amounts of people drinking and overweight that had blood pressure issues.

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?
Yes, because there was a change in blood pressure as they age and it appeared to be due to bad diets and lack of exercise.

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?
The people who were out of range were usually part of a group with lack of exercise and bad diets.

7. List risk factors associated with the hypertension. Based on your observation, which risk factor do you think is most closely associated with hypertension?
I think the biggest correlation with hypertension is being overweight and having a lack of exercise in their daily life.

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?
As I have been saying, I do believe being obese could have a strong correlation with high blood pressure. Other factors that can effect in combination could be high salt diets and alcohol consumption.