Study: Men feel more pain than women

Examining gender differences in pain perception has revealed that men feel more postoperative than women after major operations.

A team of German and Austrian researchers monitored nearly 10, 200 patients, both men and women, while surgeries while recovering from major surgeries such as knee replacement, heart or abdominal surgery.

They interviewed the patients including 42 percent male and 58 percent female from the University Hospitals of the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany.

Though the study showed there was no overall difference between the two genders’ level of pain after an operation, it unveiled that differences in pain perception would not occur in all kinds of surgeries, according to the study presented at the 2014 Euroanaesthesia meeting in Stockholm.

The researchers divided the operations into major surgery and minor treatments depending on the intensity of pain that people typically expect to feel after a particular procedure.

They say women report experiencing more pain after procedures considered as minor, such as biopsies, while the male patients feel more pain after major surgery.

An earlier study in 2012, also unraveled that “across a number of different diseases, including diabetes, arthritis and certain respiratory infections, women feel more pain than men.”

“I do not think the recent findings should change the way men and women are treated for pain as clinically, there is no relevance,” said study author Dr. Andreas Sandner-Kiesling of Medical University of Graz, Austria.