Blood Pressure Lab Report

The cardiovascular system plays a crucial role in pumping blood, nutrients, and respiratory gases throughout the body. Blood pressure is the force that pushes blood against the blood vessel walls and delivers these essential elements to the body. The highest pressure is when the artery is maximally stretched and is recorded as the systolic pressure. The lowest pressure occurs when the artery recoils and is relaxed is known as the diastolic pressure. Mean arterial pressure is the average blood pressure and is an indicator on how well the perfusion to body tissues are. A blood pressure gradient is the driving force that moves blood from one end of the blood vessel to its other end which causes a change in blood pressure (blood flows where the pressure is lower). Two components of blood pressure are cardiac output and total peripheral resistance.
The purpose of this experiment is to test this by increasing cardiac output (which increases blood pressure) to see if total peripheral resistance decreases to stabilize the blood pressure. To manage the blood pressure quickly the body uses baroreceptors This communicates with the brain about the amount of stretch of the blood vessel wall. When activated they by an increase or decrease in blood pressure they are called baroreceptor reflexes. When an increase in blood pressure occurs (such as exercising) the vessels vasodilate (stretch) a negative feedback mechanism occurs which causes a decrease in the sympathetic nervous system stimulation to decrease blood pressure. In this experiment we increased cardiac output by exercising which increases heart rate (number in which a person heart beats per minute) and stroke volume (the amount of blood ejected from the ventricles each beat) and measured the total peripheral