Women report suffering more pain than men worldwide according to a huge study. Really!

Does this not confirm a very old prejudice? Have we not long ago already discovered that women talk and admit more about pain than men. Are men talking about pain not perceived as girlish and so on. Men are expected to tolerate more pain.

Is low income a "modifiable risk factor" as this study claims? Absurd! Low income is often associated with more hard and dangerous work.

"... per a major new global study of 6 million people from 118 countries from 1990 to 2025—“one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology to date”—published in Nature Medicine ..."

From the abstract:

"Pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, yet no harmonized self-reported reference framework exists to characterize how its burden is distributed across the lifespan and world regions.

In this study, we harmonized individual-level self-reported pain data from 6,125,459 participants across 902 population-based data sources in 118 countries to establish global reference trajectories of pain.

We implemented these trajectories in an open-access benchmarking platform for positioning external datasets against global pain norms.

Pain prevalence ranged from roughly 2% for facial pain to 40% for back pain, was consistently higher in women across all 11 anatomical sites (risk ratio range: 1.08−1.83) and increased most steeply before age 55 years.

Contrary to existing estimates that generally project higher prevalence of pain conditions in higher Human Development Index (HDI) regions, we found that individuals in the lowest HDI countries experienced a substantially higher late-life prevalence of any bodily pain than those in the highest (risk difference: 30.6 percentage points (95% confidence interval: 26.9−34.3)), with low back pain approaching twice the prevalence at the oldest ages.

Globally, 18.3% of pain burden across anatomical sites was attributable to three modifiable risk factors (smoking, obesity and low income), but this varied from 12.6% in sub-Saharan Africa to 27.1% in eastern Europe, indicating that the factors underlying pain in lower-HDI settings remain poorly characterized.

Together, these reference trajectories provide a common framework for defining and comparing pain burden and informing more equitable global surveillance and prevention."

Global Health NOW: In the Wake of Nepal's Flooding, Health Threats Surge; and Japan Reshaping Science Oversight

Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries (open access)