Factors Affecting Coronary Heart Disease

The heart is a vital organ that controls blood flow to the entire body. Without the heart muscles, organs and all other body parts would die. The life choices a person makes can affect the health of their heart. For example, smoking, bad diet, sedentary lifestyle, and other choices can damage the heart in the long run. As a medical student this is an important topic of interest because it is found that, "Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and the cost to combat it is only rising" (Khan, Stewart, Davis, Harvey, Leistikow, 2015). Heart disease is a problem that must be addressed and future studies must be done to better understand the disease. Coronary heart disease is the focus of this study as it directly effects the heart. Coronary heart disease occurs when cholesterol and other debris begin occluding the coronary artery; This results in chest pain and if no preventative action is taken, ultimately a heart attack (Alba et al, 2013). Cardiovascular disease not only result is death but also can dramatically decrease the quality of life due to that disease (Petek & Bunc, 2016) This proposed study will focus on measuring the amount of lipoprotein found in blood as a result of these risk factors. High density lipoprotein (HDL) is a good cholesterol that helps clear blood vessels of debris while low density lipoprotein (LDL) is a bad cholesterol that clogs blood vessels (American Heart Association, 2014). By measuring these two types of cholesterol the relative risk of heart disease can be assessed, while this method is not perfect can provide helpful information into what causes heart disease. As future doctors and nurses, pre-health students should be aware of the types of common health problems and how to try to prevent them. Hypothesis The null hypothesis for this study will be that there is no significant difference between the means of each group. The alternate hypothesis will be that there is a significant difference in cholesterol means between groups. In this study I believe that the alternate hypothesis will be accepted as past research shows that smoking and poor diet negatively effect the heart. It is unknown how these spread out these levels of cholesterol will be, but I think there will be a difference. This paper is outlining the materials, experimental design, data analysis, and expected results of a hypothetical study aimed at better understanding the risk factors associated with smoking. Materials The only materials needed for this experiment will be: blood analysis equipment, professionals who can draw and analyze blood, people to monitor diets of patients, data analysis software, and any resources to make following guidelines of experiment easier on subjects. Sampling and Experimental Design This study will investigate the cholesterol levels of smokers, non-smokers, and past smokers. These groups will further …show more content…
In order to adequately compare each factor a two-way anova would be a good analyzing technique. A two way anova is used for finding a F-values and p-values of a data set. This can compare one group difference or several group differences. A p-value of less than 0.05 will indicate significant difference between groups. The large data set will require software analysis because we are finding the significance of each group as well as the smoker, non-smoker, and past smoker with and without the effects of diet. To understand how much these factors effect cholesterol level every group and factor must be analyzed. From this the relative risk factor of smoking as well as the added effects of diet can be …show more content…
By implementing statistical analysis and research design this study was aimed to test blood cholesterol levels in order to better understand the risk factors and long term effects of smoking on heart disease. This is an important project because of how much damage heart disease is responsible for, while this project is far from perfect it was created to produce results quickly. Other studies have compared medical files to death records to get an idea of how many deaths heart disease is responsible for but these experiments take several years and offer no treatment to the subjects. This study was designed because as a medical student, I believe data must be collected but not at the expense of the subjects. The future of medical research is bright and this disease and many others will be cured once it is better