00:02One of the central findings of our study really was showing across countries, across bodily
00:08pain sites, that women are reporting more pain consistently across the majority of the
00:14lifespan.
00:14One of the biggest challenges with pain is measuring it, objectively that is.
00:18So something you learn early on as a pain researcher is that pain is an entirely subjective
00:24experience and that is the only medium really in which at this point we can measure pain.
00:29Your 8 out of 10 on a pain scale is going to be different from my 8 out of 10
00:34on a pain
00:34scale naturally, but the only way we can really tell if someone is in pain and how severe that
00:39pain is, is just by asking them.
00:41So while a lot of other studies might try and use diagnostic criteria, and those are certainly
00:45sufficient and well-founded approaches, we decided to take an approach looking at just
00:51self-reported pain to get at the subjective nature of just what are people experiencing
00:55and what are they communicating.
00:56There's certainly both biological and social determinants of this gap in pain reporting
01:03that we're seeing.
01:04I think one thing that really needs to be taken away here is that we need more focused research
01:10in women on how to treat pain, at what points across the lifespan, what windows across the
01:17lifespan.
01:17And is pain initiating most regularly in women and what's causing it to diverge from men so
01:24rapidly at certain age groups.
01:26We're hoping that this research can get us a little bit closer to that.
01:29But for quite some time now, women have been historically underrepresented in research and dismissed in the healthcare industry.
01:37So we're hoping that we can push forward some initiative and propose some increased research on that avenue.
01:44We looked at 11 body sites specifically because when pain peaks, how fast it starts to rise at a population
01:52level.
01:53It really depends on what site you're looking at.
01:55For headache, the peak seems to be around age 35.
01:59For knee and back pain, it actually continues to rise all the way through late life.
02:04So it depends on what kind of pain we're asking about.
02:07But really, one of the central findings was that across all of the 11 sites that we looked at,
02:12we found that the actual increase, the rate of change of this curve that we've shown is peaking most rapidly
02:20before age 55.
02:22So contrary to what a lot of people think that pain is a phenomenon of just aging life, of the
02:29old, of the very old, it's really not.
02:31It's something that really starts much earlier in middle adulthood and even before that.
02:36And that really suggests we need to start looking at people at younger ages for prevention and intervention
02:40so we can help address the global pain burden that we're seeing.
