Most of us have had a sore back, a bad headache or a cramping stomach and been told to shake it off. Many women say their pain is brushed aside more often than men's. A new global tally suggests they have the data on their side.
A meta-analysis of 6.1 million people in 118 countries, published in October 2026 in Nature Medicine, found that women reported more pain than men at every one of 11 body sites studied.
The three biggest gaps were in the head and the gut. Women reported 83 percent more facial pain, 74 percent more headaches and 60 percent more stomach pain than men.
The lead author, Matt Fillingim, is a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University in Montreal. He and his colleagues harmonized self-reported pain data from more than 900 population surveys to build the first global reference curves of pain across the lifespan.
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The three biggest gaps show up in the head and the gut
Across the 11 sites, back pain was by far the most common complaint. Up to 40 percent of adults reported it, while facial pain sat at the other end at around 2 percent.
Women reported more pain at every site, but the biggest gaps clustered around the face, the head and the belly.
"What stood out in our study is that the difference was present across all 11 body sites," Fillingim told Medical News Today. He added that "there likely isn't one single explanation" for the gap.
Researchers point to several threads. Sex hormones and differences in how the nervous system processes pain play a role, as do conditions like endometriosis and painful periods.
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Higher rates of anxiety and depression among women also factor in. Women tend to seek care more often as well, which can shape how pain shows up in surveys.
Pain rises fastest before age 55 not after
The second surprise is about age. Pain is often framed as something that creeps up in old age, but the curves tell a different story.
For seven of the 11 sites, including headaches, stomach pain and neck or shoulder pain, prevalence peaked in mid-to-late adulthood and then went down again.
Only lower-body musculoskeletal pain, back, hip and knee, kept climbing into older age. According to a McGill University press release, people experience the steepest increases in pain before age 55, not later in life as might be expected.
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The pattern was sharper in less-industrialized countries. In nations with a low Human Development Index score, back pain in the elderly was almost twice as common as in richer regions.
What women can take from the numbers
Shuchita Garg, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, told Medical News Today that the study "is a major contribution to the field and challenges some of the existing data."
She added that the reasons women report more pain are "complicated and include biological, hormonal, and psychosocial elements."
For readers, the practical takeaway is simple. If your pain is persistent, out of proportion to what you would expect, or getting worse, bring it to a doctor and ask for a clear plan.
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The new reference curves give clinicians an age- and sex-matched benchmark to compare an individual patient against for the first time.
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This article is made and published by Aksel Kryhlmand, who may have used AI in the preparation.