Women suffer more pain than men throughout the body, major global study finds | Women’s health

Women report suffering more pain than men, according to a major new global study.

This was true for all types of pain measured by the researchers, and it comes amid ongoing concern about the gender gap in pain, meaning women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need.

Researchers from around the world have led “one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology” to date. The data was collected from more than 6 million people in 118 countries from 1990 to 2025, and included people aged five to over 100.

The research, published in Nature Medicine, examined how pain, as the world’s leading cause of disability, is distributed both globally and throughout the human lifespan.

The study found that women’s reported pain at 11 body sites – head, face, neck or shoulder, foot or ankle, hand or wrist, elbow, chest, back, stomach or abdomen, hip and knee – was higher than in men.

This was especially true for headaches, facial pain and abdominal pain.

In both men and women, the greatest increase in pain occurred before age 55, then peaked at age 75 or beyond, with back, hip and knee pain increasing throughout life.

This indicates “that a substantial portion of the lifetime pain burden develops during working-age adulthood,” the authors write.

Around 40% of participants reported back pain, while facial pain was the rarest (2%).

People in regions with the lowest human development index had a “significantly higher prevalence of body pain at the end of life” and almost twice the rates of low back pain at older ages.

High-intensity pain peaks at around 50, while widespread pain peaks at around 70.

“Overall, our results suggest that although the likelihood of experiencing pain increased steadily with age, the most disabling forms of pain followed an inverted U-shaped trajectory, peaking in mid-to-late adulthood before declining,” the study authors wrote.

“This distinction, between the accumulation of pain and pain that intensifies and then disappears, has direct implications for where prevention and care should be focused throughout the lifespan. »

The authors wrote that current estimates focus on diagnoses, which may mean people with limited access to health care are excluded. That’s why they analyzed rates of self-reported pain. This could serve as a basis for more equitable surveillance and prevention efforts, they wrote.

“Trajectories varied significantly by phenotype: headache, abdominal and facial pain peaked earlier in life before decreasing, while musculoskeletal pain generally increased gradually with age,” they wrote.

“Within musculoskeletal sites, upper body pain (including neck, shoulders, and elbows) peaked around midlife and declined thereafter, while lower body pain (including back, hip, and knee) continued to increase throughout life, consistent with the greater role of cumulative mechanical and degenerative loading at loading sites. »

The study found that 18.3% of the global pain burden was due to smoking, obesity and low household income. This percentage varied between 12.6% in sub-Saharan Africa and 27.1% in Eastern Europe.

In Oceania, 6.6% of pain was attributable to smoking, compared to 2.5% in sub-Saharan Africa and 8.5% in Eastern Europe, while 11.2% of pain was attributable to obesity, compared to 2.7% in Central and South Asia and 14.6% in North America. And 8% was attributable to falling income, compared to 6.6% in sub-Saharan Africa and 8.6% in Eastern Europe.

The authors noted that the research had important limitations that could affect interpretations but did not change overall trends. These limitations included different ways of measuring pain, uneven coverage between different regions and older and younger age groups, and the fact that they described patterns for particular age groups, rather than following the same people over time.

Professor Andrew Horne, director of the Center for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, described the research as a landmark study, showing that women experience more pain than men in every body site studied.

“Pain also increases most sharply before age 55, during women’s working, caring and reproductive years. There is strong evidence that the gender gap in pain is real, consistent and global. Yet women’s pain is still too often ignored, understudied and undertreated,” he said.

“Closing the gap requires taking women’s pain seriously in the clinic, regularly analyzing data by sex, properly funding research into biological and social causes, and developing better, more personalized treatments for women.”

Professor Rebeccah Slater, professor of pediatric neuroscience at the University of Oxford, agrees. “The troubling paradox is that women experience more pain, but their pain is also more likely to be ignored, diagnosed late or undertreated,” she said. “This large study shows that the higher burden of pain in women is remarkably consistent across the body and across a remarkably diverse global population. »