Dr Michelle Dickinson: Very few pain studies have been done on women

Science has just found out that men and women experience pain differently. We can never fully know how somebody else experiences pain – especially when it’s caused by something we’ll never experience ourselves such as gendered pain like childbirth (or man flu). Now a new study published in the journal Brain – https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awab408/6551129 – concludes that pain is not experienced by male and female bodies equally. Studies have found that women are more responsive to painful stimuli. Women are also much more likely to be impacted by chronic pain with women more likely than men to report back, neck and neuropathic pain. Statistically twice as many women report migraines and headaches. Interestingly when it comes to pain research, almost all of the research has been exclusively carried out on men (or male animals) meaning there is very little information out there that is gender representative. This study was unique in that it included the study of female humans as well as men looking specifically at the superficial dorsal horn. If you didn't know that you had a horn, you do now! It's a region on the outskirts of the gray matter inside your spinal cord. The researchers examined horn tissue that had been donated post-mortem and discovered that there was a difference in the way that the different genders responded to BDNF. BDNF is brain-derived neurotrophic factor and it plays an important role in pain processing, by amplifying pain signals in the short-term and reducing them in the long-term. The technical discovery was of a "pathological coupling between KCC2-dependent disinhibition and N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) potentiation within superficial dorsal horn neurons was observed in male but not female rats" In short, male and female bodies process pain differently and it's hormonally (estrogen) mediated. They were able to prove this by removing the ovaries of the female rats in the study and found that the difference in pain signaling between the males and females disappeared. Not only does this open up new research into how pain medication should be prescribed (especially as most pain medication trials are carried out on men) but also helps with the understanding of how to help treat chronic pain. Dr Michelle Dickinson, Nanogirl, joined Francesca Rudkin. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.