DETECTING DETERIORATION: BLOOD-VESSEL DISEASE
Uncontrolled high blood pressure (hypertension) can affect memory. It particularly affects ‘visual-spatial memory’, which is concerned with direction and location in space.
Men who work with three-dimensional spaces in architecture, design or building may find their ability impaired by hypertension. This condition is often silent, and thousands of men who have it are unaware of the problem.
Medication used to control hypertension may interfere with memory – particularly ‘immediate memory’. If you read a list of 15 words to a man with normal brain function, he would immediately be able to recall between five and nine words. Medication may reduce this number by one or two. For men who need to retain lots of information for complex organisations or strategic planning in board meetings, this reduction can be significant enough to impact on their performance.
Medication can also induce a ‘recency effect’, which causes men to concentrate on the latest information because they don’t recall as well the information that preceded it. As a result, they attempt to make decisions almost as if the information they received earlier doesn’t exist.
Clogged arteries can impair brain function too. They do this by depriving brain cells of blood. While many men have successful surgery on major vessels running to the heart and brain, little can be done about blockages in smaller vessels. After vascular surgery men may be left with residual impairment. As a result some people take the view that men in crucial positions in organisations should be given routine ‘higher-order function’ assessment once they have had time to recover from such surgery.
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