From Nature, 25 September 2024:
“Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny.” With those words, Kristin Scott Thomas’s character in the TV show Fleabag nailed a truth: that to be female is to be over-represented in statistics about pain.
A study of more than 27,000 people in 19 European countries found that women were 10% more likely than men to report experiencing chronic pain. Indeed, around half of all chronic pain conditions are more common in women than they are in men; only 20% are more common in men.
Female animals can also be more sensitive to pain than can males, this is also true in people, and women and girls report higher pain scores when they have the same conditions as their male counterparts. At the same time, women report that their pain is ignored or dismissed by health-care providers, they wait longer to receive care in emergency settings for acute pain than do men, and are less likely than men to receive any pain relief, including opioids. The disparity has even prompted a government inquiry in the Australian state of Victoria into medical gender bias and the challenges that women and girls face getting help for pain.
In the laboratory, researchers are working to understand the impact that both sex and gender have on pain, in the hope that finding the answers to these questions could unlock new pain treatments and help to curb the opioid epidemic in some parts of the world. In the clinic, health-care professionals are trying to grapple with a complex and multifactorial condition that can have a devastating impact on women’s lives. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 