Does caffeine affect heart rate?
Caffeine is made by plants as a way of getting rid of insects. Cocoa is produced in South America, coffee in Africa and tea is produced in Asia have all been used for a very long time to give us a little rush in order to keep us going. Caffeine is a drug that stimulates the body and causes increased
amounts of stimulatory neurotransmitters to be released. At high levels of caffeine consumption it can and has been linked to restlessness, insomnia and anxiety, this therefore causes raised stress and blood pressure. This can then lead to heart and circulation difficulties.
To determine the effects of caffeine in human life we have to take a substitute of a human being, in this case we will use Daphnia. Obviously we have to take into account that the amount of caffeine consumption of the daphnia and that of a human will be different as the scales as to how big we are a different. Daphnia are water fleas that have a sort of heart that we can see through a microscope and we can count the number of heart beats in a minute of a regular daphnia. It is also a good idea to get a new one as we want to see how much it affects it from ordinary instead of adding the caffeine one after another. We have to be careful not to feed too much caffeine to the daphnia only a maximum of 1% as we may not be able to get a reading due to it dying.
