The Effect of Caffeine on Heart Rate - Research Paper

Introduction

Caffeine is the psychoactive drug consumed by the majority of the population across the globe although it is an illegal, unregulated substance. A lot of research has been done on its use on the heart rate and blood pressure on the users. It is predicted that caffeine is the primary source of antioxidant which makes up 65% of the diet of most people. In most cases, it is used to supplement what people eat daily (Goldstein et al., 2010). Caffeine is mostly found in most drinks like coffee, tea, and even Cola. It is extracted naturally from leaves of individual trees. The use of caffeine as a drink has a physiological effect on the heart rate of the human body. There is a general perception that caffeine irritates the heart. Although most people use caffeine in their drinks today, they do not know its effect on the heart rate. It is a substance absorbs within 30 to 60 minutes once it has been ingested into the body. What people do not understand is whether it hurts the heart rate. It is proven that the use of excess caffeine to supplement energy increases the level of epinephrine of the blood. Epinephrine is responsible for the increase of the blood pressure which increases heart rate. High dosages of caffeine make the heart to develop skipped beat from upper or lower heart chamber (Graham and Sathasivam, 1998). The importance of studying the effect of caffeine on heart rate is to reduce the consumption rate of caffeine and to create awareness of the dangers and risks associated with the use of caffeine. This report is prepared for the Government to highlight them on the dangers of allowing uncontrol use of caffeine by the general public.

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This study seeks to determine the effect of caffeine on heart rate. The research question that this study aims to answer is to find out if caffeine affects the heart (Daniels et al., 1998). It is essential to care about the use of caffeine because it makes many people suffer from heart diseases without acknowledging the leading cause. This was an observational study where people were selected randomly to give their opinion on the effect of caffeine on heart rate. People have a different conclusion regarding the impact of caffeine on the heart. In this study, the researcher was determined to observe the effect of a risk factor, diagnostic tests, and treatment without making any attempt to change who is exposed to it or not.

Research Methodology

The study was focused on healthy nonobese, non-smoking and healthy men in the age ranging from 19 to 45 years old. The study population must not be suffering from any cardiac diseases. The study population was divided randomly into two groups such as control and test groups. Sixteen participants were required to be in each group, and they were required to provide written consent to participate in the study. When selecting the sample, there was no biasness, or any problem witnessed when identifying the appropriate sampling method. Quantitative data were collected from the participants. The data collected were in the form of numerical values such as how much and how many people taking caffeine were having heart rate problems. Ordinal level of measurement was used in this study because it could depict some ordered relationship between various variables. In this study, there were both dependent and independent variables. Caffeine was used as a dependent variable while the heart rate was the independent variable. There were no lacking variables in this study and case there is a missing variable it would have been tough to find the correlation between caffeine usage and heart rate.

Data Analysis

Data were distributed normally because most of the data collected in this study are clustered around the mean and data points are from the mean.

It is claimed that there is a high heart rate after taking coffee and there is a slightly low heart rate before making coffee. This means that caffeine increases the heart rate of people overtaking drinks containing caffeine.

Hypotheses

• H0: Caffeine increases heart rate
• H1: Caffeine does not increase heart rate

I would perform a test for correlation to determine the relationship between the level of heart rate after and before taking coffee. This test will be able to show if caffeine can increase the heart rate of a person. There is a 95% level of confidence if it is a two-tailed test. Using t-test with a p-value of 0.5 is essential. It is, therefore, necessary to accept the null hypothesis that caffeine increases the heart rate of a person. The result of the analysis shows that the heart rate of a person is high after taking coffee than before making coffee. This means that taking drinks with a high level of caffeine has the likelihood of increasing the heart rate. Therefore accept the null hypothesis.

Conclusion

The result of the study indicates that there is an increase in the level of heart rate after taking coffee. The mean heart rate before taking coffee was 72.323, and it increases to 83.387 after taking coffee. This indicates that coffee has caffeine and the presence of caffeine in any drink increases the heart rate not only of a patient but also for any person. The result also shows that there is a high probability of having an elevated heart rate after taking coffee than before taking coffee. As a result, there is a positive correlation between caffeine and heart rate. It is therefore recommended to consume a reasonable amount of drink containing caffeine. From the statistics, I can infer that taking excess caffeine in harmful to the normal functioning of the heart and therefore its intake should be minimised. The information that can easily lead someone to a different conclusion is when two different products with a different level of caffeine were used during the analysis. There were no missing variables. From the data collected, it was easy to identify both dependent and independent variables. It would be more appropriate to have two other products that contain caffeine and the other one with no caffeine. This would have helped in determining the effect of caffeine on heart rate and also would have assisted in conducting comparative analysis. The quantitative data that I would collect when required to do follow up study is the number of people taking drinks containing caffeine and those that do not make any product that contains caffeine within the last three weeks.

References

Graham T and Sathasivam P (1998). Metabolic and exercise endurance effects of coffee andcaffeine ingestion. J Appl Physiol. 1998;85(3):883-9.

Goldstein et al. (2010) International society of sports nutrition position stand: caffeine andperformance. J Int Soc Sports Nut 7:5.

Daniels, J. W., Mole, P. A., Shaffrath, J. D., & Stebbins, C. L. (1998). Effects of caffeine on blood pressure, heart rate, and forearm blood flow during dynamic leg exercise. Journalof Applied Physiology, 85(1), 154-159. doi:10.1152/jappl.1998.85.1.154