When people discuss their experiences of getting tattoos, sustaining sports injuries or giving birth, a question often comes up: Do people of different sexes experience pain differently?
It turns out that, on a cellular level, there do seem to be inherent differences in how males and females process painful stimuli. But the question of which sex — if either — has a higher pain tolerance has a fuzzier answer.
For a person to feel pain, sensory neurons called nociceptors detect painful stimuli and then send a signal to the brain for interpretation. These painful stimuli include extreme temperatures, mechanical pressure and inflammation. People show differences in how they perceive each stimulus, and these differences stem from various factors, including a person’s sex.
Several studies have reported that women have higher pain sensitivity and a lower pain threshold than men. For instance, a 2012 study that examined how men and women respond to physical pressure found that women are more sensitive to mechanical pain than men are. In another study, men and women were asked to indicate when they felt a heat stimulus and judge its intensity. It suggested women have lower pain thresholds to heat than men.
“It is well known that females are more sensitive to pain than males,” said Jeffrey Mogil, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University who studies sex differences in pain. “This has been shown in humans in hundreds of studies; not all of them are statistically significant, but essentially all of them go in the same direction,” Mogil told Live Science.
However, some studies actually show the opposite.
Related: Do women get cold more easily than men?
In a study published in 2023, researchers recruited 22 adolescents — 12 females and 10 males — for a thermal pain sensitivity test. These participants were exposed to hot and cold stimuli and then asked to rate the intensity of their pain. The males rated higher pain intensity to both stimuli than the females did.
Still other studies have suggested that there are no differences in how males and females respond to pain-inducing heat.
This dissensus exists among scientists because there are no “meaningful” metrics for measuring pain tolerance, said Frank Porreca, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Arizona. A given person’s pain threshold and tolerance tend to vary across tests and environments;…
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