Women report more pain than men across every part of the body, according to a global study that examined pain in 6.1 million people across 118 countries and the full human lifespan. The research, published in Nature Medicine, found the pattern held for all types of pain the researchers measured, adding large-scale international evidence to longstanding concerns about a gender pain gap in which women are less likely to receive the pain relief they need.
The study produced age- and sex-specific reference curves for pain at 11 sites on the body, giving clinicians and researchers a benchmark for comparing pain assessments across different populations and cohorts. Rather than relying on a single national sample, the analysis pooled data from more than six million individuals, making it one of the broadest portraits yet assembled of how pain varies by sex, age, and geography.
One of the most striking findings concerns timing. The steepest rise in reported pain occurs before age 55, meaning the divergence between women and men is not simply a feature of old age. Pain levels continued to climb later in life as well, but the sharpest increase appeared earlier in adulthood, a period when many people are still working, raising families, and managing other health demands.
The study also identified a clear economic dimension. Late-life pain was highest in countries with the lowest Human Development Index, the composite measure of health, education, and income. That finding suggests that pain in older age is shaped not only by biology but by the resources available for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. In lower-HDI settings, where access to specialists, medications, and rehabilitation may be limited, pain appears to weigh more heavily on aging populations.
For researchers, the reference curves offer a practical tool. By establishing expected pain levels by age and sex across multiple body sites, the data allow future studies to compare their own cohorts against a global standard. That kind of benchmarking can help distinguish normal variation from clinically meaningful differences and can support more consistent measurement in trials and surveys that previously used incompatible methods.
The findings arrive amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap. Women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need, and their reports of pain have historically been more likely to be dismissed or attributed to emotional factors. A study of this scale, covering all measured pain types and spanning the lifespan, makes it harder to treat the disparity as anecdotal or as the product of a single clinic or country.
The research does not explain why women report more pain, and the authors do not claim to have identified a single cause. Biological differences, hormonal factors, social roles, and differences in how symptoms are reported and received by clinicians could all contribute. The study's contribution is descriptive and comparative: it establishes the size and shape of the gap across ages, sexes, and 11 pain sites, and it locates the steepest divergence before age 55.
That descriptive strength is also a limitation. Because the analysis draws on reported pain rather than clinical diagnoses, it captures how people describe their experience rather than a confirmed underlying condition. Still, with 6.1 million people in 118 countries, the dataset is large enough to reveal patterns that smaller studies could not detect, and the reference curves give the field a shared measuring stick.
The practical implications extend to health systems in both wealthy and developing countries. If the steepest rise in pain occurs before 55, then prevention and management efforts aimed only at the elderly will miss the period when the gap widens most. And if late-life pain is concentrated in the lowest-HDI countries, then global health policy on aging and pain relief may need to direct more attention and resources to those settings.
The study was published online on 5 October 2026 in Nature Medicine.