A study in mice and humans have found that women tend to forget pain that they suffered more quickly than men. The study has challenged the widely held belief that the fairer sex are more sensitive to pain than men. The study, by researchers from Canada University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), showed that men and women remembered earlier painful experiences differently.
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The researchers said that when experiencing pain again and again, men seemed to be stressed and hypersensitive in remembering but such is not the case with women. Women were not stressed by their earlier experiences of pain. “If remembered pain is a driving force for chronic pain and we understand how pain is remembered, we may be able to help some sufferers by treating the mechanisms behind the memories directly...What was even more surprising was that men reacted more, because it is well known that women are both more sensitive to pain than men, and that they are also generally more stressed out”, said lead author Loren Martin, Assistant Professor at the UTM.
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For the purpose of study which is published in the Current Biology journal, the team conducted experiments on both humans and mice where they were taken to specific rooms and made to experience low levels of pain caused by heat delivered to their hind paw or forearm. Further, human participants were asked to wear a tightly inflated blood pressure cuff and exercise their arms for 20 minutes, while each mouse received a diluted injection of vinegar designed to cause a stomach ache for about 30 minutes. When the next day the participants returned to either the same or a different room and heat was again applied to their arms or hind paws, men rated the heat pain higher than they did the day before, and higher than the women did.
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