gender-targeted pain relief

generally research indicates that women have a lower threshold for pain (despite the urban legend claiming the inverse). scientists aren't really sure why, and aren't just satisfied with the answer that women are just wussier. biological, psychological, and even psychosocial factors have been implicated.

pain research and gender differences is very important, as millions in the us suffer daily with chronic pain. transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (shortened to “tens” for obvious reasons) is one method used by scientists to both increase pain threshold and inhibit pain processing. new research (pdf) indicates that tens helps women increase their pain threshold, but has little effect on men, likely because of interaction of hormones and opioid receptors:

The present results show that the subjects in this study responded to high frequency TENS in a gender-related manner at the electrical pain threshold level. Women's thresholds were systematically increased whereas the men's were unaffected on the group level. On an individual basis some men reported an increase in thresholds. However, others did not, and some even reported a decrease. To our knowledge, other studies on TENS-induced effects on pain thresholds have not reported on gender-related differences. Taken together, a plausible interpretation is that women may benefit from high frequency TENS whereas the response from men varies.

this seems like a breakthrough in pain research to me. article is in-press and will be forthcoming from neuroscience letters.

update: neither the doi link or the fulltext article link are working for some reason. i'll try to find better ones.

reference: Iréne Lund, "Gender differences in electrical pain threshold responses to transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS)," Neuroscience Letters, In press. doi cite: doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2004.10.068

Labels: neuroscience