Researchers looked at pain around the world and across the human lifespan, finding steepest rise happens before age 55

Women report suffering more pain than men, a major new global study has found.

That was true for all types of pain the researchers measured, and comes amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap, which means women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need.

Researchers from all over the world carried out “one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology to date”. Data was collected from more than 6 million people from 118 countries from 1990 to 2025, and included people from five years old to more than 100.

The research, published in Nature Medicine, looked at how pain, as the leading global cause of disability, was distributed both around the world and across the human lifespan.

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[–] 10 points 18 hours ago (27 children)

They didn't, though they do mention pain is complicated to study specifically because diagnosing it necessarily relies on self reporting. This unfortunately makes it virtually impossible to account for that fact. If someone tells you they have some level of pain, there is very little to nothing you can do to know if they are over exaggeratjng, under exaggerating or doing neither.

A more accurate headline would be that women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain.

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  • [–] -1 points 18 hours ago (26 children)

    There is no difference between reporting and experiencing a high level of pain unless you believe women as a group lie or exaggerate about it.

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  • [–] 14 points 17 hours ago (12 children)

    I would recommend you educate yourself on the limitations of surveys in scientific research. Humans have subjective responses to survey questions. It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the results, without accusing anyone of lying or exaggerating. Understanding the experience of another person fully is impossible, and one of the core problems philosophers, scientists, and artists gave been wrestling with fot as long as humans have been sentient.

    It is all the more reasonable to be skeptical of the ridiculous headlines from an outlet like the Guardian attaches to stories like these. It is stoking the flames of gender conflict to get clicks rather than providing any useful information.

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  • [+] -6 points 17 hours ago* (11 children)

    If there’s something specific you’d like to address about my point feel free, because this just reads like “nuh-uh.” What evidence do you have that women, as a group, are more likely to over-report pain? What mechanism do you suggest would lead to women as a group over-reporting pain, since individual differences are flattened out in a sufficient sample size? Why is it consistent across 118 countries if it’s not something that is measurably occurring?

    You accuse the Guardian of engaging in gender war clickbait while denying the findings of a scientific study? Doesn’t seem scientific to me.

    Out of curiosity, would you also say this about a study with men and social isolation (another entirely self reported metric)? How skeptical would you be that they really feel isolated? If there’s a difference you should interrogate why.

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  • [–] 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (3 children)

    What evidence do you have that women, as a group, are more likely to over-report pain?

    I have absolutely 0 evidence for that because I never made that claim at all. That would an incredibly dumb claim to make. You're arguing in bad faith on behalf of a divisive culture war and putting words in mouth.

    You accuse the Guardian of engaging in gender war clickbait

    I accuse the Guardian of engaging in click bait in general. That's a significant portion of their business model.

    denying the findings of a scientific study?

    This post is not the findings of a scientific study. It's a headline ans an entertainment article which is vaguely referencing an actual scientific study in an actual academic journal. That paper is titled "Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries", not "Womrn Suffer More Pain Than Men..."

    Doesn’t seem scientific to me.

    I never made any claims as to the "scientific" quality of this, and i'm really confused as to why you are suddenly focusing so hard on the word "science". FYI- tossing the word "science" around is usually not very effective at convincing people you are right.

    Out of curiosity, would you also say this about a study with men and social isolation (another entirely self reported metric)

    This is an oddly phrased question but I'll try to read between the lines at what you're getting at here. "loneliness" is a far more abstract concept to even try to measure, so any results will be even more subject to the limitations of surveys than pain. It would be far more accurate to state "X group reports loneliness at a higher rate than Y group" rather than staying "X group experiences more loneliness than Y". The whole point i'm making is that the word "experiences" is different from the word "reports".

    "Male loneliness" is just "loneliness" with more gender war spin applied to it. Loneliness is reportedly increasing across all genders, age groups, and pretty much any other way you slice it in countries with broad access to the internet.

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  • [–] -5 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

    Were you aware studies consist of more than a title?

    Drawing on individual-level data from 1.2−4.9 million distinct participants per pain site, pain prevalence varied markedly across anatomical sites and followed distinct age trajectories by site and sex (Fig. 2). Overall prevalence ranged from 2% for facial pain to 40% for back pain. Women consistently reported higher prevalence than men across all 11 sites

    Trying to spin this with philosophy about how knowable another person’s pain is frankly a horseshit response to a finding about a group that is taken less seriously in medical settings about the legitimacy of their pain.

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  • [–] 6 points 12 hours ago

    Once again, the actual academics in the study use the phrasing "reported" rather than "experienced". Which is what is said is the better way to do it. The scientific paper is correct, the Guardian is sensationalist.

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  • [–] 5 points 12 hours ago

    Right, the study reports this correctly. The article does not.

    Implying a point is incorrect because it is philosophical makes no sense, as you said that's just going "nuh uh" and if there is something specifically wrong you should be able to point it out.

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  • [–] 6 points 13 hours ago (6 children)

    paul wasn't saying they definitely feel less pain than they report; he was saying that this study can only measure their reported pain, not their actual pain. He does not need to give you the specific disproof you are looking for because he is not claiming the study's conclusion is definitely false, just that its methodology is not sufficient to prove its conclusion.

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  • [–] -5 points 12 hours ago (5 children)

    That’s true of the men in the study as well, so why is the data about their pain more trustworthy? You need to come up with an explanation for why women or men would nearly universally, cross-culturally engage in over or under reporting without even knowing it if you’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and claim it’s all unknowable.

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  • [–] 6 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (4 children)

    I should really stop responding if you aren't going to read the thread. Tl;dr: Their data is not any more reliable and it's insane that you think that claim was being made at any point.

    And "You need to come up with an explanation"-- no, we don't. The article's title is an illogical claim to make based on the study's methodology. Pointing that out does not require coming up with a reason why the two values (reported vs experienced pain) might differ, it only requires pointing out that they are not necessarily correlated. The authors of the study knew this, which is why they did not make the claim that the article is making.

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  • [–] -3 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

    ‘All pain study findings are fake because you can’t objectively measure it’ is an even worse response to the findings.

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  • [–] 5 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    It's also a more correct response though. The idea is to point out a potential flaw in the conclusion drawn from the study, not to say that it should be entirely ignored. Recognizing what is and is not being measured to identify limitations is like science 101, it's taught in every science class in school, and yet the article fails to do it; so we are doing it instead.

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  • [–] -3 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

    It absolutely isn’t ’more correct’, and it’s absurd to act like it’s scientific to pretend these basic questions aren’t addressed in study design. Go dig up the specific quotes from the study that demonstrate the specific methodology you have a problem with, you are not a better scientist than someone published in fucking Nature with this incredibly basic complaint about pain studies.

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  • [–] 5 points 12 hours ago*

    You have to be trolling. Again, the study is fine. The article's title is the thing drawing an unsupported conclusion. I've said this before:

    The article’s title is an illogical claim to make based on the study’s methodology.

    The authors of the study knew this, which is why they did not make the claim that the article is making.

    Recognizing what is and is not being measured to identify limitations is like science 101, it’s taught in every science class in school, and yet the article fails to do it

    Right, the study reports this correctly. The article does not.

    I will not respond further. Please read arguments before responding to them.

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  • [–] 3 points 16 hours ago (7 children)

    Or, you know, men as a group Underexaggaurate about it, which is literally the verbarim stated point of the comment I'm replying too. Did you even read the stuff you're replying too

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  • [–] -2 points 15 hours ago* (6 children)

    Conversations move along, you’re the one that was trying to make a distinction between what women claim they experience and what they actually experience. And that’s what I responded to, since it would make no damn sense to take up something you said with the OC.

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  • [–] 6 points 15 hours ago* (3 children)

    If you think what I wrote even remotely implies that women lie about their pain level as a group, then you have the reading comprehension of a child.

    I wrote "Women report higher levels of pain" because I was (fucking obviously) rephrasing the actual headline in a more accurate rigorous way. The study was about self reported pain, so an accurate headline should use the word "reported" because that's what the study is about. It's not a study on actual pain experience, it's a study on self reported pain. That doesn't imply that anyone is lying about anything, much less that one specific group is, it's just basic accuracy and rigor, and I wrote "women" in the example headline because I was obviously rephrasing the orignal headline and the original headline used women. Also, you know, if, hypothetically both genders EXPERIENCE the same level of pain, BOTH women over exaggerating OR men underexagguraring would lead to higher reported pain by women, so writing that women report, but do not experience higher levels of pain doesn't actually give any implication whatsoever about which gender is the one misrepresening, it only implies that (at least) one group is, not which. And since the previous comment was specifically about men under reporting pain, I was obviously talking about the possibility of a split between actual and reported pain existing because of men misrepresenting it as a group, not women. So you jumping to the conclusion that I'm claiming women are lying about their pain levels is ridiculous and does not even remotely in any way whatsoever flow from anything I wrote.

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  • [–] -3 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

    A more accurate headline would be that women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain.

    For clarity, you’re saying it’s an insane reach to read this as claiming there is a mismatch between what women experience and what they report? The literal words you wrote that said ‘women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain’? And you believe I’m the one that can’t read?

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  • [–] 6 points 13 hours ago*

    For clarity, you’re saying it’s an insane reach to read this as claiming there is a mismatch between what women experience and what they report?

    That is not what you claimed. You used the phrase "lying or exaggerating", implying a conscious intent to decieve.

    Additionally, Devial was comparing the two headlines, not women, when using "report" vs "experience". They were not suggesting the title should highlight the gap between women's reported and experienced pain, but that a title highlighting the gap in reported pain between men and women is more accurate than one that highlights the gap in experienced pain.

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  • [–] 6 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

    Yes. Because with the context of

    A) the top level comment

    And

    B) the fact that I was obviously literally just changing the word "suffer" to "report" in the original headline

    And

    C) the obvious fucking fact that "Women report higher levels of pain than men (but don't necessarily experience higher levels of pain)" is a logically equivalent statement to "men report lower levels of pain than women (but don't necessarily experience lower levels of pain)" and therefore includes no insinuation about which gender is misreporting

    Yes, it's extremely fucking obvious to anyone who can read what I meant.

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  • [–] 3 points 17 hours ago* (4 children)

    Or men as a group lie and minimize their own discomfort?

    Why jump immediately to the worst possible interpretation?

    frankly, given our patriarchy and internalized misogyny it's far more likely the men are lying - or more precisely, deluding themselves - to protect their ego

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  • [–] -3 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

    How is ‘actually it’s men that lie as a group’ better than saying the same of women?

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago*

    a) the other reply makes the point about men feeling internalized societal pressure to appear "tough"

    b) you need to assess your biases that made you assume the OC was taking a shot at women, or even a shot at either gender. You jumped directly to the worst possible interpretation when there are many other ways to read the OC's intent

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