In general men develop hypertension sooner than women and so does their blood pressure. But when women hit menopause things get much worse for them. With aging the blood vessels become less elastic and therefore do not react to changes as well. Blood pressure generally rises with age; there are several possible reasons for this including a change in hormones, over consumption of salt and the heart not working as hard.
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.
If you took the men of the group and accelerated their age to be in their 40's to 50's which is when men tend to really have blood pressure and are most overweight which is a huge factor in heart and circulatory problems, and took the women and accelerated their age to post-menopause to around 60 you would see their incident of heart and circulatory problems increase greatly.
3. How will you use the investigation screen to test your hypothesis? What steps will you follow? What data will you record?
I will increase the age range for the men a little bit, and increase the age of the women to around 60. I will record how my manipulation affects their blood pressure.
4. Analyze the result of your experiment. Explain any patterns you observed.
Well I wasn't able to get anyone up to 60 because the program didn't have that option. The two major factors that seemed to be a cause of high blood pressure for both men and women were alcohol and being overweight. Other causes were family history, lack of exercise and high salt intake. The rate of high blood pressure increased with age in both men and women, but more in men, since we we're looking at pre- to mid-menopausal.
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?
As I stated in the previous question age and gender are a huge factor, and my hypothesis was partly right, however, I wasn't able to increase the age as much as I wanted to.
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?
Absolutely, as I said earlier, being overweight, high salt intake, lack of exercise, alcohol consumption and family history were all contributing factors to high blood pressure. But the two most common factors I found were being overweight and alcohol.
7. List risk factors associated with the hypertension. Based on your observation, which risk factor do you think is most closely associated with hypertension?
Family history, being overweight, high salt intake, alcohol consumption, and lack of exercise. It seemed that being overweight and alcohol consumption were the two biggest factors in high blood pressure in both men and women, however alcohol consumption seems to be even worse for women than men.
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?
Obesity is a huge factor in high blood pressure. And it seems that obesity in my test subjects was most often associated with alcohol consumption.
Here is the table of average blood pressures
Male Systolic Male Diagstolic Female Systolic Female Dialostic
Age 11-17 117 75 116 74
Age 18-24 130 81 115 74
Age 25-34 129 80 115 75
Age 35-44 127 81 126 81
Age 45-54 136 87 128 78
Here is the Graph of the blood pressure averages
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