Pain is a stimulus that people feel when something hurts them physically. This is important for survival, especially in pain that can be life threatening. A pain study explains why women feel more pain than men.
The study has found that the immune cells are more active in the area where pain is processed in the brain in women than in men. This has resulted in women suffering more from chronic and inflammatory pain. Pain medication then might be less effective for women than they are for men.
Hillary Doyle, graduate student from Georgia State University and author of the study has said that women need to have twice morphine dosage to get pain relief. For the study, the research team has studied how pain affects rats. The lab rats were given a medication which would stop microglia activity in the brain.
Microglia is in the brain and always looks for infection or pathogens. Pain medication works by interfering with this process. An example of this would be morphine. Morphine is viewed as a pathogen, which would then activate the immune cells. This would then release inflammatory chemicals in the body called cytokines, according to the Georgia State University's News Hub.
In the study, it has been found that the microglia could be a target for pain medication especially for women. Women suffer more pain from such conditions like fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis, as Science Daily reports. These conditions require pain management and medication.
The study not only looks at how pain affects women differently from men, but its goal is to also find medication that can help women manage pain better. This is important as osteoarthritis is also more prevalent in women than in men. Pain management would be needed for women who suffer this condition in old age.
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