Women report more pain than men across all types, major global study finds

Women report more pain than men across all 11 body sites assessed in a global study involving more than six million people.

The gap was particularly pronounced for headache, facial and abdominal pain, while pain in both women and men increased most steeply before the age of 55.

Researchers analysed self-reported pain data from people aged five to more than 100 across 118 countries between 1990 and 2025.

The study assessed pain in 11 areas: the head, face, neck or shoulder, foot or ankle, hand or wrist, elbow, chest, back, stomach or abdomen, hip and knee.

Women reported higher pain levels than men at every site.

Around 40 per cent of participants reported back pain, while facial pain was the least common at 2 per cent.

For both women and men, pain increased most steeply before 55 and peaked at or after 75. Back, hip and knee pain continued to rise throughout life.

The researchers said this suggested a substantial proportion of lifetime pain develops during working-age adulthood.

High-intensity pain peaked at about age 50, while generalised pain peaked at around 70.

“Overall, our results suggest that, although the likelihood of experiencing any pain rises steadily with age, the most disabling forms of pain followed an inverted-U trajectory, peaking in mid-to-late adulthood before declining,” the study authors wrote.

“This distinction, between pain accumulation and pain that intensifies and then resolves, has direct implications for where prevention and care should be concentrated across the lifespan.”

Different types of pain followed different patterns with age.

“Trajectories varied markedly by phenotype: headache, abdominal and facial pain peaked earlier in life before declining, whereas musculoskeletal pain generally rose progressively with age,” the authors wrote.

“Within musculoskeletal sites, upper body pain (including neck, shoulder and elbow) peaked around midlife and declined thereafter, whereas lower body pain (including back, hip and knee) continued to increase across the lifespan, consistent with the greater role of cumulative mechanical and degenerative load at weight-bearing sites.”

People living in regions with the lowest Human Development Index had substantially higher rates of bodily pain later in life and almost twice the prevalence of low back pain in older age.

The study estimated that 18.3 per cent of the global pain burden was attributable to smoking, obesity and low household incomes, ranging from 12.6 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa to 27.1 per cent in eastern Europe.

The researchers noted several limitations, including differences in how pain was measured, uneven coverage between regions and the oldest and youngest age groups, and the fact that the analysis compared different age groups rather than following the same individuals over time.

Professor Andrew Horne, director of the Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Pain also rises most steeply before age 55, during women’s working, caring and reproductive years.

“It is strong evidence that the gender pain gap is real, consistent and global. Yet women’s pain is still too often dismissed, underresearched and undertreated.”

“Closing the gap means taking women’s pain seriously in the clinic, routinely analysing data by sex, properly funding research into the biological and social causes, and developing better, more personalised treatments for women.”

Professor Rebeccah Slater, professor of paediatric neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said: “The troubling paradox is that women experience more pain, yet their pain is also more likely to be dismissed, diagnosed late or undertreated.

“This enormous study shows that the higher burden of pain in women is remarkably consistent across the body and in a remarkably diverse global population.”