According to the American Heart Association, cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death in the United States of America today. To better understand heart disease and predict its development, this project will attempt to study the markers that the human body presents prior to the development of heart disease.

Individuals, who are genetically hypertensive, have genes that increase their probability of having high blood pressure, which will then put them at a higher risk of developing CVD. Hypertension causes the cardiac muscle of the individual to become damage, as the heart has to constantly work harder than normal to pump blood throughout the entire body. Due to hypertension, the individual is at a higher risk of having heart attacks, strokes, and other CVD. Hence, the body will send chemical signals to initiate the process of inflammation to repair the heart. The chemicals that will be explored in this experiment that participate in the process of inflammation are eicosanoids.

In this experiment, a method to recognize the eicosanoids that will be extracted from the tissues and organs of the experimental specimens will be developed. The method will incorporate data of known eicosanoids that are present in certain tissues and organs of the body, and the use of a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and a mass spectroscopy machine. The procedure developed will produce a reference that results in the identity of each eicosanoids, and the specific time that the eicosanoids will separate from a mixture. With the reference, it will then be possible to identify and compare levels of eicosanoids extracted from the tissues and organs of healthy and hypertensive specimen via HPLC and mass spectroscopy.