Heart Rate Experiment: A Study of the Effects of Chronic Smoking on Resting Heart Rate

Heart Rate Experiment: A Study of the Effects of Chronic Smoking on Resting Heart Rate  

Student Name

Grand Canyon University: Bio 202 Lab

October 20, 2015

Abstract

Heart rate is an important health factor affected by most factors that produce a change in the body physically. Heart rate varies among individuals according to many factors, one including whether or not an individual identifies as a chronic smoker. Smoking is the largest contributing detriment to preventable deaths. Smoking causes many cardiovascular and coronary heart diseases that have been proven through many studies to correlate strongly with heart rate response (“Smoking-Suppressed Heart Rate Recovery in Young Male College Students Who Regularly Exercised”, 2015). This study evaluates a group of individuals and their resting heart rates and how those averages vary between smokers and non-smokers. The hypothesis is that individuals who smoke at least 3-5 times a week have an overall higher resting heart rate than those who do not. This speculation was proven wrong as the results maintained a consistent correlation with a decrease in resting heart rate among those who smoked. This result is due to a number of things, mostly pertaining the decrease in overall cardiac function in those who inhale nicotine on a regular basis.

Heart Rate Experiment: A Study of the Effects of Chronic Smoking on Resting Heart Rate  

Introduction

        Heart rate is another name for the pulse of the heart, described as the speed of the heartbeat taken by the number of contractions of the heart per a unit of time, usually a minute. The heart rate is established by pacemaker cells, which lie in the sinoatrial node in the right atrium of the heart. Heart rate varies among individuals according to their body’s physical needs and changes according to many factors that affect the body such as physical exercise, sleep, anxiety, stress, illness, drugs and eating habits. Because of the fact that heart rate varies between persons, it is important for individuals to be knowledgeable of their own heart rate as it can be a valuable instrument for measuring the health of one’s heart. To find one’s heart rate, or pulse, place two fingers on either the wrists, inside of elbow side of neck, top of foot and count the number of beats that occur over 60 seconds. The resting heart rate is the heart pumping the lowest amount of blood necessary because the body is not doing any strenuous work, and the value usually lies between 60 and 100 beats per minute. While it is obvious that heart rate is influenced by physical exercise, it is maybe less obvious what other factors there are that affect the heart’s pulse. For example, normal things such as driving and taking an exam to the ingesting of various liquids such as soda, coffee and water all have an influence on heart rate in some way or another. Another stand out factor that affects an individual’s overall heart rate is smoking. Tobacco use is easily the most avoidable cause of disease and death in the world today because it causes an increase in a variety of negative health concerns such as respiratory diseases, cancer, and also cardiovascular diseases. Smoking has also been shown to start a cardiac autonomic imbalance, or dysfunction in one’s cardiac autonomic function. Moreover, studies in the past have attributed cigarette smoking to increases in the threat of ventricular fibrillation and death. More specifically, smoking is associated with decreases in the sympathetic nervous system’s function and autonomic cardiac function (Harte & Meston, 2014). The aim of this experiment is to measure the heart rate of over 500 college students ranging in ages from around 18 to 46, taking into account many factors including chronic smoking and to evaluate the fluctuation of resting heart rate between these individuals based on that factor. It was hypothesized that people who smoke at least 3-5 times a week have an overall higher resting heart rate than those who do not smoke at all.