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WITI HEALTH
It's Not Just In Your Head - Women Do Have More Pain
These findings came from Dr. Kenneth Hargreaves, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Endodontics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA), who spoke at a recent conference. He mentioned that many studies have validated, across various areas (surgery, fibromyalgia, migraines, cancer, etc.), that women do have more pain, and they experience it twice as often. He shared the process and findings of UTHSCSA's research into whether pain is sexist. Our estrogen appears to be the culprit. Researchers first examined the impact of pain in rats by injecting female rats with estradiol, the main estrogen found in women's bodies. They found a 2-3X increase in pain response. Then, a study of humans having surgical biopsies also found that females have a much stronger response to pain. Further research pointed to estrogen increasing the amount of prolactin (a hormone that causes milk production after childbirth) being produced in the pain neurons. All of this knowledge about the impact of estrogen in the body is opening new doors for treating pain in women. Here we have one more impact of estrogen. Having elevated levels of estrogen, such as from oral contraceptives or hormone replacement therapy (HRT), may make you more susceptible to pain as well as increasing your risk of breast cancer. And if you're on estrogen and have rheumatoid arthritis, prolactin can make it worse by triggering swelling in the joints, further increasing your pain. The correlation between pain and stress is most fascinating. While acute (short-term) stress decreases your pain when your body's "fight or flight" response kicks in to allow you to flee danger, prolactin actually increases when the body is under chronic stress (intense or long-term debilitating stress), increasing your pain. Thus, one answer to the question we posed last time about whether there is a physiological component in why women are more vulnerable to stress is that our normal estrogen levels, and the prolactin that estrogen spawns, puts us at risk for more pain and thus more stress - a closed-loop, self-reinforcing process. There are a number of leaps we could make from these findings to other things in a woman's life, such as the role of estrogen, prolactin, stress, and pain in post-partum depression, but for now, let's simply let medical science validate possible correlations. So why has it taken so long to discover these things? Primarily because researchers long avoided studies involving women of child-bearing age due to the impact of monthly hormonal swings and the potential risk to the fetus if a woman got pregnant; however, a few years ago, more government funding was earmarked for women's health research and that stimulated many of the important research findings that have recently surfaced. These findings will stimulate research into solutions for our pain.
What Does This Mean To You? Are you also under a great deal of stress? Managing your stress can help you manage your pain. It's not fair that we have more pain and more stress, but as my mother used to say to my sisters and I when we were growing up, "Life isn't fair." That used to frustrate me, but she was so right. However, improving your health, and managing your stress, can help alleviate your everyday pain, eliminating that self-reinforcing cycle of pain and stress. So get started now to be healthier! It's never too soon to start, nor is it ever too late! Just do it!
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As a woman, do you feel that you have more pain? Research has confirmed that you probably do. And not just a small percentage more, but actually many times more. Your stage of life may influence the amount, too. Why is this, and what's happening?