Women report suffering more pain than men, a major new global study has found.<\/p>\n
That was true for all types of pain the researchers measured, and comes amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap<\/a>, which means women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need.<\/p>\n Researchers from all over the world carried out \u201cone of the largest harmonisation efforts in pain epidemiology to date\u201d. Data was collected from more than 6 million people from 118 countries from 1990 to 2025, and included people from aged five years to more than 100.<\/p>\n The research, published in Nature Medicine<\/a>, looked at how pain, as the leading global cause of disability, was distributed both around the world and across the human lifespan.<\/p>\n It found women\u2019s self-reported pain across 11 bodily sites \u2013 head, face, neck or shoulder, foot or ankle, hand or wrist, elbow, chest, back, stomach or abdomen, hip and knee \u2013 was higher than for men.<\/p>\n That was particularly true for headache, facial and abdominal pain.<\/p>\n For men and women, the steepest increase in pain happened before people turned 55, then peaked at or beyond 75, with back, hip and knee pain increasing across the lifespan.<\/p>\n That indicated \u201cthat a substantial share of lifetime pain burden develops during working-age adulthood\u201d, the authors wrote.<\/p>\n About 40% of participants reported back pain, while facial pain was the rarest at 2%.<\/p>\n