Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I'm a student helping out 5th graders in a science experiment and they want to test the hypothesis of fats and lack of exercise causing a heart attack. Weve done the research already, but now we are stuck in thinking of an idea to test or even show the outcome. Could you please help us think of an experiment that tests or shows that lack of exercise and too much fat can lead to a heart attack.

Clogged brains..

Can you possibly steer them towards a simpler topic, or a simplified version of that topic? Broad questions about long term effects of human diet and behavior are notoriously difficult to answer, even for career scientists.

For a simpler project, here is a dataset that you could download for them to analyze:
ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/machine-learn ... /cleve.mod
You could have them apply some age-appropriate math to see if they can find any patterns in the data.

how about building models of blood vessels?
i expect in your research you have read about atherosclerosis, how heart disease and high cholesterol can effect the inside of blood vessels. Also i expect you have read about how a clot inside a blood vessel can cause a heart attack or a stroke.

you build a healthy blood vessel and and fatty blood vessel model. then you could measure the flow of model blood through each to see how it is different.

think about ways to model blood - is blood just liquid? would water be a good model? or should it have bits in it?

what about blood vessels - what are the differences between healthy blood vessels and those with heart disease? would a pipe be a good model? what about a rubber tube? how would you model the disease in the tube? maybe if you use a clear plastic tube you could take a video of what happened inside the tube.

hopefully this will help you get started with some ideas. post back as you think of some more,
best of luck,
caroline