Reflection

Statistics is the only module in Nursing that has figures. It is also the only module that require us to do our project on blog. It was quite a challenge as it is something different from the usual and not all know how to use blog. We were lucky to have group members that know how to operate a blog.

So the question we got for our project is regarding blood pressure before and after exercise. As usual, we will do the outline of our project to see how we can about doing it. There is one component that we have to conduct an experiment to get the data. We were wondering how are we going to make it possible because we have to take twice and do an exercise in between. Despite all odds, we conducted our experiment in school and with the help of our schoolmates, we were able to retrieve all 30 samples. During the experiment, we discovered the vast difference between the before blood pressure and after blood pressure and of course we were glad that our experiment was successful, mainly for the response that we received. Really thankful for them and felt happy for the group effort as well.

The last stretch of the project would be the analysis part, conclusion and reflection. Got to admit it was like going through another hurdle. Putting everything up on blog wasn't as easy as it seem but slowly we managed to do bit by bit and finally come to this reflection. In end it was satisfying to see the end result of this project.

Measuring blood pressure is important as its is one of the vital signs and one of our basic skills for our profession. From this research we were able to see how exercise affects blood pressure and it gives us an idea of how much changes does it make if a patient of ours were to do exercise and we took the blood pressure next. We will roughly know how much the patient blood pressure is affected and we can do our estimation of how much to minus from the results we get.

In conclusion, this is a useful experiment as we could apply to our practise in future!

to my dearest group members. And,

for viewing. :D

Results and Analysis

From this, we can see their average pre systolic pressure is 102.6±11.066 mmHg and the average post systolic pressure is 120±11.167 mmHg.
There is an increase about 18 mmHg , so we can see that the pre and post have a positive relationship between them.

As for the diastolic pressure, the pre diastolic pressure is 62±7.779 mmHg, while the post diastolic bp is 66.0±8.648mmHg.
There is actually not much of a difference compared the pre and post systolic, which is also cooperant to one of the articles, Immediate Response of Cardiovascular System to Exercise. It said, “Diastolic pressure on the other hand remains relatively unchanged regardless of exercise intensity.”

The diastolic pressure in our data shows that it either remain the same, increase a bit or decrase a little. The changes is not so great, the average is about 4mmHg.

Systolic

From this table we can see that Pearson’s R value is 0.755 which indicates a strong positive relationship between pre systolic and post systolic bp,( P=0.000 which is <0.05.)

From this table we can see that a Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.458 indicates a positive moderate relationship between pre diastolic and post diastolic. ( our p value is 0.011<0.05)

According to the p value we reject our null hypothesis, which is, there is no significant positive relationship between blood pressure before exercise and blood pressure after exercise.

So we accept our hypothesis, there is a significant positive relationship between blood pressure before exercise and blood pressure after exercise.

Experiment

So this is basically what happened on our experiment day.

Before BP.

Exercise time!

After BP.

Thanks people for participating!

How Are We Going To Do Our Experiment?

We have decided to conduct our experiment in school as our school has students that are within our target group, which is 18 to 25 years of age.

For each student whom we decide to take their blood pressure(BP), will be well-instructed and also we'll explain to them our purpose for carrying out the experiment. It is important to be ethical and ask them for permission as we do not want to force them into our experiment.

We are using a sphygmomanometer as well as a stethoscope for our experiment and only one of us is going to take the blood pressure.

The instructions we'll be giving them are:

- Relax

- Sitting in an upright position, without crossing legs

- Not to talk when BP being taken

- To do some exercise after taking the first BP

The kind of exercise we encourage them to do would be going up a few flight of stairs or run a few metres to and fro, something active. So after they did their exercise, we will then take the BP again for the 2nd reading.

So that's the plan!

Literature Review

Before we get on with our experiment, we did some research on how exercising affects the blood pressure.

Purpose of literature review: To use the meta-analytic approach to examine the effects of progressive resistance exercise as a non-pharmacological intervention for reducing systolic and diastolic blood pressure in people.

This literature review helps us to start, minimize variables and control our research. We chose reliable blood pressure instrument. Blood pressure is taken by one person before and after exercise in one participant to reduce errors.

We did the literature review about what university of Britain Columbia have done. They want to find the factors that will affect blood pressure and also does systolic BP vary to the same degree as the diastolic BP. They take blood pressure before and after exercise, and then using SPSS to analyse. Their end result showed that the systolic increase about 14.4mmHg, diastolic increase 3.4 mmHg, However this article didn’t give us any results about what the relationship between blood pressure before and after exercise.

James, M.W. & Musini, V. M. Factors affect blood pressure. [on-line] Available:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005673#pone-0005673-t003 (18 July 2010)

What Are Our Variables?

We have 2 important variables which are Independent and Dependent variables, and also 1 Extraneous variable. Our independent variable is exercise, and the dependent variable is blood pressure. The extraneous variable is diet, weight, genes, psychological factors, environment, physical position etc.

It is important to minimize the extraneous variables. This is to reduce the number of errors in our experiment and get more accurate results.

To minimize variables,
- Use the same blood pressure set

- Ask samples to relax before blood pressure taking takes place

- Refrain them from talking

- Position them in the same position

- Get samples from a particular age group

We control the variables that we can control.

About Our Question

So this is our question,

"Is a person's blood pressure before exercise related to his blood pressure after exercise?"

Blood pressure is one of the vital signs to provide critical information needed to make the decision, in treatment and also our nursing care. In this case, we want to know how exercising will actually affects a person's blood pressure. We want to know the relationship between exercising and blood pressure and this will help us nurses to better understand our human body.

Hypothesis:

There is significant positive relationship between blood pressure before exercise and after exercise.

Conceptualization:

What is the definition of blood pressure?

Blood pressure is the pressure exerted by circulating volume of blood on the walls or arteries and veins and on the chambers of the heart.

What is the definition of exercise?

It is the performance of any physical activity for the purpose of conditioning the body, improving health, or maintaining fitness or as a means of therapy for correcting a deformity or restoring the organs and body functions to a state of health.

Operationalization:

Blood pressure is measured by using a sphygmomanometer, scale in millimetre of mecury (mmHg).

It specifies exactly what we are going to observe, and how we will do it. Whereby it is to observe the blood pressure difference. It is a description of the 'operations' that we will undertake to measure a concept.

Introduction of us!

The Awesome Group 2!

Nur Maisarah Bte Mohamed M
(Group Leader)

Ma Zin Win Mar

Stella Lim

Tian Yujing

Wee Hui Miao

:)