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The Effects Of Deep Breathing On Heart Rate And Blood Pressure Essay

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The Effects of Deep Breathing on Heart Rate and Blood Pressure Intro: Research has shown that deep breathing exercises can induce an increase in heart rate (Sroufe 1971) because heart rate is also directly correlated with breathing (Egri 2012). When breathing in, heart rate will increase; and while breathing out, heart rate will decrease (Egri 2012). Blood pressure can be reduced with slower breathing (Joseph et al. 2005). An article in the Journal of Human Hypertension showed that doing breathing exercises over a period of time can lower both systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Grossman et al. 2001). The hypothesis in this experiment is that blood pressure and heart rate will be affected by a deep breathing exercise. The null hypothesis was that heart rate and blood pressure will be unchanged while performing a deep breathing exercise. This experiment is significant because it could help people in times of stress or anxiety/panic attacks to learn ways to calm their heart rate and blood pressure down so they may feel better. Being the most common mental illness in the United States and 18% of Americans living with it, research aiding recovery of panic attacks would be extremely useful to the public (Kessler et al. 2005). Materials and Methods: A sphygmomanometer was used to measure the blood pressure and heart rate of the subject. First, the basal heart rate and blood pressure for each subject was collected by taking the mean of the data on the left arm from three

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