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Science seminar project. Stimuli’s effect on blood pressure By Matt Drucker. Introduction. Blood pressure is the force that the blood exerts on the walls of the arteries. High blood pressure results in the condition called hypertension. Hypertension can cause heart attack or stroke.
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Science seminar project Stimuli’s effect on blood pressure By Matt Drucker
Introduction • Blood pressure is the force that the blood exerts on the walls of the arteries. • High blood pressure results in the condition called hypertension. • Hypertension can cause heart attack or stroke. • Exposure to relaxing stimuli can help prevent hypertension. • The brain regulates blood pressure by releasing epinephrine. • Upon receiving a stimulus, the strength of the heartbeat increases which raises the blood pressure.
Introduction Cont’d • Stress is the body’s physical and emotional response to change. • High blood pressure is a sign of stress. • High stress levels can result in stroke or heart disorders. • The onset of stress is caused by the body’s response to a stimulus. • Depending on the stimulus the stress levels will either increase or decrease.
Hypothesis • The effects of positive stimuli will lower the blood pressure. • Negative stimuli will raise the blood pressure of each test subject to different levels depending on the sensory stimulation. • The amount of change will range between age groups and gender yet there will be a correlation between people of the same age and gender for each sensory stimuli.
Methodology • I predicted which stimuli would lower and which would raise blood pressure. • I exposed 6 people to 3pairs of each of the 5 sensory stimuli: smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound. • I had a controlled environment and a controlled time to get more accurate results. www.sirinet.net/ ~jgjohnso/brain.html
Results Page 1 This is the graph of one subject and all of her results to the individual stimuli. The y-axis is the change in blood pressure and the x-axis is the stimuli.
conclusions • I have concluded that the older people have a higher response to stressors than younger people. • The Visual stimuli had a greater affect on the younger subjects. • The tactile and gustatory stimuli had a greater affect on the older subjects. • Taste seemed to have a lower effect on the blood pressure. • There was no clear difference of results between the gender of the subjects.
Future studies • These results could lead to a more advanced study where more people are tested with more stimuli. • These results can be used to develop the most affective method for treating stress to lower the risk of stress-related disorders. The stimuli that had the greatest affects on lowering blood pressure can be combined to create this.