By Men and women experience pain differently, and until now, scientists didn’t know why. New research says it may be in part due to differences in male and female nerve cells.
Pain-sensing nerve cells from male and female animal tissues responded differently to the same sensitizing substances, researchers report June 3 in Brain. The results suggest that at the cellular level, pain is produced differently between the sexes.
The results might allow researchers “to come up with drugs that would be specific to treat female patients or male patients,” says Katherine Martucci, a neuroscientist who studies chronic pain at Duke University School of Medicine and was not involved in the study. “There’s no debate about it. They’re seeing these differences in the cells.”
