Is having a higher pulse rate healthier?

Why do females have higher pulse rate but lower mean arterial pressure?

• Im doing an assignment and with the results I took of my class overall.. females had a higher pulse rate but lower mean arterial pressure? why could this be? also.. males had higher systole but similar diastole as the females. I tried to search for it online and in the library books but couldn't find anything =/

• Answer:

  Pulse rate is simply a matter of scale and sizes, so is related to body weights of female and male. The smaller they are, all animals from elephants to fleas have higher heart rates, - just like babies and adults, and if your class had compared heart rates of male and female but taken body sizes into account, I think you'd have found that a large female would often have a lower or equal pulse to a small male. That part of your question's easy. The other question, about mean arterial pressure is much harder to explain, because it's not systolic and diastolic pressures that matter, but "pulse pressure" and diastolic, because mean arterial pressure is defined as diastolic plus roughly one-third of pulse pressure. Pulse pressure is the difference between systolic and diastolic and is superimposed on diastolic, so obviously if male pulse pressure is higher, and diastolic (male and female) is roughly the same, then systolic, the sum of the two, will be higher. Pulse pressure in both male and female is proportional to stroke volume, the amount of blood pumped out by the heart at each stroke , and this, of course is linked to body size. So a bigger body has a slightly bigger heart and pumps out more blood to cope with the demands of a bigger body, and that means a bigger stroke volume, and higher pulse pressure. (and by extension, higher systolics). Males are on the whole bigger than females. So again, if you'd taken body weights into account, you'd have probably found that a large, well-developed female would be just as likely to have a high mean arterial pressure as a weedy little chap half her size! Just one final thing,(and your teacher will neither like nor agree with this), but the whole concept of "Mean Arterial Pressure"or MAP, is tosh and nonsense. I've explained the answer to your questions, simply because that's what they teach you, but the fact is that MAP is nonsensical. Let me give you an example:- A BP reading of 102/99 gives an MAP of 100 (which is considered excellent, and standard). But a BP reading of 240/30 also gives the same MAP of 100. But any patient with BP readings of either 102/99 or 240/30 would need to be in Intensive Care and would not be likely to survive. Yet if the doctors saw only their MAP's of 100, they'd rate them both as "excellent". There is a perfectly simple scientific way of showing why it's a spurious concept, but not in this answer.