Effects of Caffeine Consumption on Resting Heart Rate and Peak Ventilation

Frequency in Female E112L Students

Introduction:

In today's world people run on caffeine. The wide range of caffeinated drinks (coffee,

tea, energy drinks and soda to name a few) also makes caffeine highly accessible. This

creates a growing urgency for determining the effects of caffeine consumption on

cardio-respiratory health. Caffeine can block adenosine receptors (A1 and A2) and

increase autonomic nervous system activity (Gonzaga et al, 2017). Adenosine is a

purine nucleoside base and modulates learning, memory, and sleep to name a few

(Mercedes et al, 2021). More specifically extracellular adenosine increases during

waking hours. So sleep deprived subjects tend to have a higher extracellular

concentration (Mercedes et al, 2021). By blocking the receptor, caffeine prevents a

person from feeling tired. Similarly, the increase in the autonomic nervous system

activates the fight or flight response decreasing sleepiness and elevating the heart rate.

With an elevated heart rate the body also requires more oxygen. This is obtained

through an increase in the ventilation frequency or breaths taken per minute. There is

also limited studies on caffeine consumption in undergraduate students. Taking all this

into consideration and the fact that females tend to be poorly researched I hypothesize

that females who consume caffeine will have a higher resting heart rate and higher peak

ventilation frequency than those who don’t consume caffeine.

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Methods:

Subjects

This study was conducted using 110 subjects currently enrolled in E112L at UCI. The

subjects self-reported their sex, height, weight, age, hours exercised, type(s) of

exercise, and caffeine consumption within the last 2 hours of the test.

Subject Selection

Subjects were divided into two groups - those that consumed caffeine within the last two

hours of the test and those that did not. In order to limit variance between the two test

groups only those subjects that had their data collected using the ECG method were

kept while the PulseOz group was removed. Anyone over the age of 22 was also

excluded so the control had an average age of 21.0 +/- 0.00 years old while the

experimental was 21.3 +/- 0.463 years of age. The height range was also narrowed to

154-170 cm and anyone out of this range was excluded. This resulted in an average of

160.9 +/- 4.23 cm for the control and 163.1 +/- 5.08 cm for the experimental group.

Lastly the study was narrowed to females so all male subjects were excluded as well.

Using this criteria 8 subjects were selected for both groups (those that consumed

caffeine and those that did not).

EKG Set Up

Subjects removed any rings, bracelets, and necklaces. They cleaned the right and left

sides of the abdomen and the right shoulder with an alcohol pad using an abrasive pad.

They were told to clean sites that did not have a lot of muscle to limit conflicting data.

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The appropriate colored electrodes were then attached to the cleaned sites (Right

Shoulder = White lead, Right Abdomen = Black lead (ground), and Left Abdomen = Red

lead). An ace bandage was then wrapped around the torso to ensure the leads would

not fall off.

Resting Heart Rate

Subjects were instructed to stay seated with their feet flat on the ground. Once they

were completely relaxed data was recorded for 3 minutes using an ECG. Heart rate was

measured once each minute so a total of three heart rate measurements were

recorded. The average heart rate for all subjects was collected using the I-Beam cursor

to highlight the last minute of recovery data.

Peak Ventilation

Subjects were instructed to perform a four-step cadence using a metronome set to 88

beats per minute. Data was recorded for 3 minutes during which time the subjects

continued to breath through an Airflow Transducer. F2 was pressed when the exercise

started and F5 was pressed when they stopped. The peak ventilation was recorded by

counting the number of breaths for all subjects for the first 15 seconds after they

stopped exercising.

Statistical Analysis

An unpaired t-test was then conducted for both resting heart rate and peak ventilation to

determine the significance.

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 Caffeine Resting
within 2 Heart Peak
ECG/ Sex Height hours of Rate Ventilation
Subject PulseOx (M/F) (cm) Age test? (bpm) (breaths/min)
23 ECG F 163 22 Yes 88.9 32
39 ECG F 170 21 Yes 69.4 20
43 ECG F 165 21 Yes 86 23
50 ECG F 160 21 Yes 95 28
56 ECG F 167 21 Yes 85 28
59 ECG F 157 21 Yes 69 28
62 ECG F 160 22 Yes 73 24
64 ECG F 155 21 Yes 87 24
22 ECG F 160 21 No 85 40
26 ECG F 157 21 No 88 20
28 ECG F 165 21 No 87.9 34
30 ECG F 160 21 No 88.5 14
37 ECG F 154 21 No 85 24
38 ECG F 165.1 21 No 89.6 20
42 ECG F 160.2 21 No 79.8 28
65 ECG F 166 21 No 74.5 21

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Results:

The experiments showed the effect of caffeine consumption on resting heart rate (bpm)

and peak ventilation frequency (breaths/min) with an n of 6 for each experimental group.

From the data an average resting heart rate of 81.7 +/- 9.82 bpm was calculated for the

caffeinated individuals. An average of 84.8 +/- 5.18 bpm was calculated for the

uncaffeinated individuals. A subsequent unpaired t-test led to the conclusion that

caffeine consumption had no significant effect on resting heart rate as the p-value of

0.439 was greater than 0.05 (Figure 1). Therefore, I rejected my initial hypothesis that

caffeine consumption would increase the resting heart rate.

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From the peak ventilation data an average of 25.9 +/- 3.80 breaths/min was calculated

for caffeinated individuals. For the uncaffeinated individuals an average of 25.1 +/- 8.48

breaths/min was calculated. Therefore, caffeine consumption had no significant effect

on peak ventilation frequency as the unpaired t-test gave a p-value of 0.823 which was

greater than 0.05 (Figure 2). As a result I also rejected the initial hypothesis that

caffeine consumption would increase the peak ventilation frequency.

Discussion:

Caffeine consumption is a major part of college culture. Due to the high workload and

stress students have become reliant on caffeine to make it through their days as they

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are largely sleep deprived. This raises major long-term health concerns. Additionally,

females tend to be largely under-represented in research so this study focused on the

effects of caffeine consumption on females specifically.

I had hypothesized that caffeine consumption in female undergraduates will result in an

increase in resting heart rate and peak ventilation frequency compared to those that

don’t consume caffeine. However, the data failed to support this as there was no

significance seen in either variable. In fact the averages were nearly identical.

Due to limited studies on undergraduates it’s difficult to tell if these results were

expected or if they were the result of some confounding variable. However, other

studies of older adults have shown caffeine consumption increases the peak ventilation

frequency (Ruiz-Moreno et al, 2020). This difference could result from the differing age

groups, the fact caffeine was provided in capsule form instead of liquid, or the fact the

subjects were initially light caffeine users. Since they weren’t originally consuming large

amounts the sudden caffeine intake might have had a larger effect. Additionally, the

absorption of caffeine from the capsule might have had longer term effects as it took

more time to be digested.

In regards to heart rate similar results to mine were seen amongst 10 trained cyclists

(Daniels et al, 1998). These individuals did not normally consume large quantities of

caffeine and were fairly active. This could have made them less susceptible to drastic

changes in heart rate. So while the results did match my own there are still some

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confounding variables. I would like to see if this lack of change continues in future

studies.

This was a strictly short term study. There was no clear indication of how much caffeine

each student took, or if the control groups had consumed caffeine prior to those 2 hours

before the test. There was also no data on how long the subjects had been consuming

caffeine for. For future studies I would like to see if adults that regularly consumed

caffeine from their undergraduate years had any significant increases in resting heart

rate and peak ventilation rate compared to those that had not consumed caffeine (either

at all or rarely).

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