Researchers looked at pain around the world and across the human lifespan, finding steepest rise happens before age 55
Women report suffering more pain than men, a major new global study has found.
That was true for all types of pain the researchers measured, and comes amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap, which means women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need.
Researchers from all over the world carried out “one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology to date”. Data was collected from more than 6 million people from 118 countries from 1990 to 2025, and included people from five years old to more than 100.
The research, published in Nature Medicine, looked at how pain, as the leading global cause of disability, was distributed both around the world and across the human lifespan.
“It found women’s self-reported pain across 11 bodily sites – head, face, neck or shoulder, foot or ankle, hand or wrist, elbow, chest, back, stomach or abdomen, hip and knee – was higher than for men.”
Self report, not really all that useful. Could be anything from “women experience more pain” to “women are encouraged to speak up about pain” to “women are less inured to pain”. I’m afraid it’s a bit clickbaity.
Ever get that weird pain in your chest when you stretch or something? I can’t tell you how many phantom pains like that I get and ignore but also forget
That’s actually growing pains and eventually stops
Spoiler - it reappears in your 40s
That’s just growing old pains. Those eventually stop too.
Random pain in your 20s: “huh, weird, oh well”
Random pain in your 40s: “so this is how it ends”
I have that. I mentioned it to my doctor at my last physical. He diagnosed it as something called “slipping rib syndrome”, where some of your ribs aren’t fused properly.
Why not? Pain is a subjective experience. If someone experience high levels of pain consistently, that is reason to do something about it. Someone else may experience less pain for the same cause, but that doesn’t invalidate other experiences. In the end it’s about helping people and making their lifes better.
Although for such studies it would be good indeed to factor in socialisation effects. If men are raised to suppress expressing pain when they’re in pain, while women are not, that might bias the results.
Do we have a non-invasive method for objectively measuring pain?
My issue is that it leads to more than one conclusion and we have no reason to choose one over the others.
all that, and because people lie.
lying about pain is a great way to socially manipulate the people around you.
I don’t see how you can do a study about pain without self reporting. No one can say how much pain another person is feeling. Thats why the hospital has that face ruler to get you to give them a number.
No-one is arguing with that; just that they have lots of possible conclusions and they chose one for no good reason.
Pretty sure that face ruler was put there to sell oxy, actually xD
I always liked it. Its like if I were to make a face for how much this hurts it would look like that one.