You are a researcher studying the cardiovascular system (CVS), in particular RBC (erythroblasts) production in iron deficient anemia patients. Recently an article was published in a medical journal that Vitamin A may boost RBC production because Vitamin A may improve uptake of iron by the developing RBC in the bone marrow.

Using all the components of experimental design that we have discussed in class, design an experiment to study dietary intake of Vitamin A and its effect on RBC production.

Notes:

Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin. The RDA for Vitamin A is 800 g. Doses > 33,000 g/day are considered to be toxic.

A normal RBC count for males and females, on average, is 4.5 x 10⁶ cells/l; a RBC count < 4.4 x 10⁶ cells/l is indicative of anemia.

Students: You are specifically being tested on your ability to design an experimental protocol. Make sure you include all of the following in your response:

1. Question
2. Hypothesis
3. Desired sample size
4. Independent Variable (IV) and Dependent Variable (DV)
5. Confounding Variables: List 3
6. Explain how the confounding variable listed above will be controlled
7. The control group (baseline group)
8. Design: describe in detail what you would do with your experimental and control groups to test your hypothesis. Be sure to include what kind of clinical testing you would use to obtain your data
9. Results: identify the type of graph (line/bar/scatter) you would use for visualization of the results (with axis labels: x=? y=? and graph titled).