Women reported pain more often than men at every one of 11 body sites examined in a global analysis of more than 6.1 million people. The finding describes self-reported pain prevalence across populations; it does not show that every woman experiences more pain than every man, or explain why the difference appears.
What did the global pain study find?
The peer-reviewed study, “Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries,” published in Nature Medicine in 2026, harmonized individual-level self-reported pain data for 6,125,459 participants from 902 population-based data sources in 118 countries. The data were gathered over multiple years; The Guardian describes the covered period as 1990–2025, not a single synchronized survey.
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Across all 11 anatomical sites studied, women had higher reported pain prevalence than men. The sites were head, face, neck or shoulder, foot or ankle, hand or wrist, elbow, chest, back, stomach or abdomen, hip and knee. The difference was particularly pronounced for headache, facial pain and abdominal pain.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →This is a comparison of how often people reported pain, not a finding that women necessarily rated every episode as more intense. It also does not establish a single biological, social or healthcare explanation for the sex difference.
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How did pain vary by age and type?
Overall, the likelihood of reporting pain rose with age, with the steepest increase occurring before age 55. Patterns differed by pain type: back, hip and knee pain continued to increase across the lifespan, while headache, abdominal and facial pain peaked earlier and later declined.
High-intensity pain peaked at about age 50, while generalized pain peaked at about age 70. These are population-level age patterns assembled from different data sources, not a forecast for an individual or proof that a particular person’s pain will follow the same course.
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Which pain sites were most common?
According to The Guardian’s summary of the study, about 40% of participants reported back pain, while facial pain was the rarest, at 2%. These are study estimates reported by the newspaper, not universal rates for every country, age group or survey.
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No. The analysis establishes a consistent difference in reported prevalence, but cannot determine how much of it reflects biology, differences in exposure or social conditions, healthcare experiences, or variation in how surveys measured pain.
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The study also estimated that smoking, obesity and low household income together accounted for 18.3% of global pain burden. This is a modeled risk-factor attribution based on exposure prevalence and risk estimates; it should not be read as proof that these factors caused an individual’s pain.
The Guardian reported higher bodily-pain prevalence among older people in lower Human Development Index regions, including nearly twice the rate of low back pain in older age compared with the highest-HDI regions. That comparison is a regional population pattern, not an individual-level explanation.
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How should the results be interpreted?
The researchers combined surveys that varied in how they asked about pain and defined it. Geographic representation was uneven, as was coverage of the youngest and oldest ages. The analysis compares age groups drawn from population data; it did not follow the same people throughout their lives.
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Those limits matter: the study offers an unusually broad picture of reported pain, but its reference curves are not a clinical diagnosis, an explanation of cause, or a measure of treatment quality in every country. Andrew Horne, director of the Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh, called the results evidence that the gender pain gap is “real, consistent and global” in comments reported by The Guardian. Rebeccah Slater, professor of Paediatric Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, separately highlighted concerns that women’s pain may be dismissed or undertreated. These are expert reactions, not conclusions tested by this analysis.
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