Traditional pain relief medications do not work as well for women compared to men, prompting an expert in chronic pain management to call for more gender-specific pain therapies.
Men’s bodies are receptive to synthetic opioids for pain relief, whereas women’s biological receptors are not wired that way, according to a groundbreaking study by the University of California San Diego School of Medicine study which evaluated medication for chronic lower back pain.
Men and women feel pain relief differently, with women requiring higher dosages of pain relief for medication to be effective, Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., professor of anaesthesiology and Endowed Professor in Empathy and Compassion Research at UC San Diego Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion said.
“These results underscore the need for more sex-specific pain therapies, because many of the treatments we use don’t work nearly as well for women as they do for men,” Dr Zeidan said.
“Although speculative, our findings suggest that maybe one reason that females are more likely to become addicted to opioids is that they’re biologically less responsive to them, and need to take more to experience any pain relief.”
The study combined data from two clinical trials involving 98 people, including healthy individuals and those with chronic lower back pain.
The study found men and women use different biological systems to relieve pain.
Men release endogenous opioids (the body’s natural painkillers), while women rely on other non-opioid based pathways such as meditation.
In both men and women, people with chronic pain experienced more pain relief from meditation than healthy participants.
The researchers concluded that tailoring pain treatment to an individual’s gender could improve patient outcomes and reduce the reliance on and misuse of opioids.
“There are clear disparities in how pain is managed between men and women, but we haven’t seen a clear biological difference in the use of their endogenous systems before now,” Dr Zeidan said.
“This study provides the first clear evidence that sex-based differences in pain processing are real and need to be taken more seriously when developing and prescribing treatment for pain.”
Read the full study: Self-regulated analgesia in males but not females is mediated by endogenous opioids.
