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 harmonisation 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 aged five years 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. It found women’s self-reported pain across 11 bodily sites – head, face, neck or shoulder, foot or ankle, hand or wrist, elbow, chest, back, stomach or abdomen, hip and knee – was higher than for men.
That was particularly true for headache, facial and abdominal pain. For men and women, the most steep increase in pain happened before people turned 55, then peaked at or beyond 75, with back, hip and knee pain increasing across the lifespan. That indicated “that a substantial share of lifetime pain burden develops during working-age adulthood”, the authors wrote.
About 40% of participants reported back pain, while facial pain was the rarest at 2%. Those in the lowest Human Development Index regions had substantially “higher late-life prevalence of bodily pain”, and almost twice the rates of low back pain in their older age. High-intensity pain peaked at about 50, while generalised pain peaked around 70.
That could provide a foundation for more equitable monitoring and prevention efforts, they wrote. This ranged from 12.6% in sub-Saharan Africa to 27.1% in eastern Europe. In Oceania, 6.6% of pain was attributable to smoking compared with 2.5% in sub-Saharan Africa and 8.5% in eastern Europe, while 11.2% of pain was attributable to obesity, compared with 2.7% in central and southern Asia and 14.6% in North America.
And 8% was attributable to lower incomes, compared with 6.6% in sub-Saharan Africa and 8.6% in eastern Europe. The authors noted that there were important limitations on the research which could affect interpretations but did not alter the overall patterns. Those limitations included different ways of measuring pain, uneven coverage across different regions and oldest and youngest age groups, and that they described patterns for particular age groups, rather than following the same people over time.
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