Biology A Level

Welcome back to Biology. For this final series of tasks, I’d like you to complete a mini research project.

Research into Cardiovascular Disease (CVD)

The aim of the project is:

1. To research:

• types of CVD
• key risk factors
• the benefits and risks of specific drug treatments for CVD

2. to practise and develop scientific research and referencing skills needed for A Level

Instructions:

To complete this task you will need to do the following:

1. Use the Internet to carry out research on the specified areas of cardiovascular disease (please make sure you’re choosing reputable websites for this).
2. Type or write your research onto an A4 sheet. Do not simply copy or cut and paste information, but present the information in your own words.
3. Reference the websites and specific pages that you use for each piece of information you gather (see more details below).
4. Bring your completed work with you to your first Biology lesson.

Referencing:

You need to reference every website page you use information from so the information can be found again at a later date or by someone else. Please do this in the following way:

1. Once you have written some text, you must insert a number after it, for example [1].
2. At the end of the document insert [1] and next to it paste the link to the webpage where you found the information. (See the end of the document for more information.)
3. If your next bit of written text came from another source, put [2] after it. Then insert [2] at the end of the document and paste the new link next to it.
4. If you use text from the same webpage but in a later part of the document, you can use the original number again, i.e. [1], but you do not need to add anything new to the reference list at the end.
5. The reference list at the end of the document must be in numerical order.

Resources:

There are numerous excellent websites that can be accessed to help you with this task. A couple are listed below to start you off:

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/conditions (The British Heart Foundation – BHF)

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/cardiovascular-disease/ (The NHS)

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cardiovascular-diseases-(cvds) (The World Health Organisation – WHO)

Search through these websites, and others, to access different pages and find the information that you need.

DO NOT reference Wikipedia. If you do read something on a Wikipedia page, access the link that the information has been gathered from. To do this, click on the hyperlinked number next to the text, this will take you to the reference. Then click on the reference to go to the original/primary document or website to use and reference that.

TASK 1: With the above in mind, please research and write a definition for cardiovascular disease, to answer the question:

• What is Cardiovascular Disease?

TASK 2: We’d now like you to research the main types of Cardiovascular Disease, and then write a few sentences to describe each of the following:

• Coronary heart disease (CHD), also known as ischaemic heart disease or coronary artery disease, and its symptoms (angina, heart attack and heart failure)
• Stroke
• Aneurysm
• Peripheral vascular disease
• Thrombosis and deep vein thrombosis (DVT)

TASK 3: There are many risk factors for CVD. Please research and find as many as you can:

• Try to be as specific as possible, for example, don’t just mention ‘diet’, but the specific components of an individual’s diet, i.e. saturated fat.
• Be specific about whether the factor has to be high or low to be a risk factor, for example, not just ‘blood pressure’, but ‘high blood pressure’. 
• Describe how the risk factor contributes to the person’s risk, for example, high blood pressure can damage the lining of arteries.
• Categorise each risk factor into ‘modifiable’ (the individual has control over changing it, for example, by eating less saturated fat) or ‘non-modifiable’ (the individual has no control over it and cannot change it).

To record your findings, please copy out the table below and list the information under the relevant headings. You should use as many rows as you need!

TASK 4: For the next task, we’d like you to look into drug treatments used in CVD. Please copy and complete the table below by researching how each drug works, and their risks and benefits to the individual.

TASK 5: Finally, you need to create a reference list, detailing all the websites and pages you’ve used information from. At this stage, you can just paste in the page URL next to the appropriate number that you gave the bit of text in your main document. Your references must appear in square brackets in numerical order, as follows:

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

I hope you enjoy this project and I look forward to seeing what you’ve produced in September.