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When the great unwashed discuss their experiences of get tattoos , sustain sports accidental injury or giving giving birth , a question often come up : Do hoi polloi of dissimilar sex activity know pain otherwise ?
It turns out that , on a cellular degree , there do seem to be inherent divergence in how male person and females march painful stimuli . But the question of which sex — if either — has a higher pain tolerance has a fuzzier answer .
Men and women might process painful stimuli differently, at least at a cellular level.
For a person to feel infliction , sensory neurons cry nociceptors discover afflictive stimuli and thensend a signal to the brainfor interpretation . These painful stimuli let in extreme temperature , mechanical pressure andinflammation . People show differences in how they perceive each stimulant , and these differences stanch from various factors , including a person ’s sex .
Several studies havereported that women have higher pain sensitivityand a down pain threshold than men . For instance , a 2012 studythat examined how men and woman respond to physical atmospheric pressure found that women are more sensitive to mechanical pain than men are . In another study , men and womanhood were asked to betoken when they felt a heat stimulant and pass judgment its intensity . It suggested woman havelower pain thresholdsto heat than men .
" It is well known that female person are more sensitive to pain than male , " saidJeffrey Mogil , a prof of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University who study sex differences in pain . " This has been shown in man in 100 of sketch ; not all of them are statistically significant , but essentially all of them go in the same direction , " Mogil tell Live Science .
However , some studies in reality show the opposite .
Related : Do women get cold more well than men ?
In astudy published in 2023 , researchers recruited 22 adolescents — 12 female and 10 male — for a caloric pain predisposition test . These participants were exposed to hot and cold stimuli and then require to place the intensity of their pain . The male rated higher pain intensity to both stimuli than the female did .
Still other subject have suggested that there are no difference in how males and femalesrespond to pain in the neck - get heat energy .
This dissensus subsist among scientist because there are no " meaningful " metric function for measuring pain sensation tolerance , saidFrank Porreca , a prof of neuroscience at the University of Arizona . A minded person ’s pain sensation threshold and leeway tend to vary across tests and environment ; plus , some study find that females are more reliabletest theme than males , providing more consistent ratings of their pain .
Porreca studies mechanisms that can promote pain , and he and his squad latterly discovered that males ' and females ' nociceptors areactivated by different substances . That is , the first step for pain perception disagree between the sexes .
Mogil order Live Science that it had not previously been shown that features of the nociceptors themselves are sex - pendant .
It was get it on that infliction stimulation need to pass certain threshold to activate nociceptors . Usually , a low - intensity stimulus , like toast cold weewee , would not spark off nociceptors — but if you have a sore in your oral cavity , the nociceptors there would be activated . Porreca explain that , in this scenario , the doorsill for nociceptor energizing is lowered , and his squad wanted to know if this " sensitizing " was sex - dependent .
To look into , they try out nociceptor cells from the dorsal root ganglion , a terminal near the spinal cord through which sensory information pass to the centralnervous system . The squad took cells from manlike and female mice , nonhuman archpriest and humans and expose the cells to various substances .
Previous studieshave implicated the hormone prolactin in females ' response to pain and a chemical substance messenger called orexinin males ' pain in the neck responses , so these seemed like the arrant agentive role for the experimentation . The result showed that the cells behaved other than when exposed to either heart across all of the sampled species .
Prolactin lower the threshold for nociceptor activating in females but did n’t affect males . Conversely , orexin sensitized manlike cells but had no effect on the distaff cells . Both marrow naturally occur in both sexuality but in different assiduousness .
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" The nociceptors that we derive from either manlike or female animal or postmortem human donors are quite different in what process produce this lowering of thresholds , " Porreca say .
He added that this find could help devise pain therapies that would be optimize for men and women , especially as " most of the humanity ’s pain patients are char . " For illustration , the chronic - botheration condition fibromyalgia ismore common in women than menin the U.S.
" Regardless of which sex is more sensitive to pain , there ’s increase grounds , like this paper here , that the circuitry go bad on behind the scene is different circuitry in males and female , " Mogil said . " The arrangement is in reality a different system in males versus female person , and that ’s in reality the more interesting part . "
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