We speak of chronic pain when it persists for more than six months, when the treatments do not relieve it properly and when it has a considerable impact on the person’s quality of life. This type of pathology requires multidisciplinary care. Several elements of the literature support the hypothesis that men and women do not experience pain in the same way. One team wanted to go deeper into the subject; their work was published on March 23 in the journal Brain.
Why is pain management the same for men as for women?
Women suffer from chronic pain more often than men. It’s a fact. For example, 90% of patients with fibromyalgia are women. Women are twice as likely to headache and to migraine only men. In the management of pain, and in particular chronic pain, the fact that the patient is a man or a woman is not often considered. The same protocols are offered to men and women. You have to go back to the genesis of a drug to understand why. Indeed, studies on the neural circuits of pain carried out in animals, most often rats, relate almost exclusively to males. In human trials, if there are as many men as women included, data from male and female subjects are rarely analyzed separately.
Different neural mechanisms
The authors wanted to study the neural mechanisms underlying chronic pain according to gender. To do this, spinal cord samples from 10 women and 12 men were recovered from deceased patients. Male and female rats were also included in experimentation.
The BNDF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) is a protein which has the property of increasing sensitivity to pain. This did not cause the same reactions in female or male human tissues and in male or female animals. The neural mechanisms of pain were different by sex. More interestingly, the female rats that had undergone resection ovaries reacted like male rats.
These results provide lessons. Regarding the interpretation of data from animal experiments and clinical trials in humans, it should be carried out separately, sex by sex. This implies that there are enough subjects in each group. Concerning the design of treatments painkillersthey must target mechanisms common to both sexes.
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