Prospective clinical observational study evaluating gender-associated differences of preoperative pain intensity

Abstract

Previous studies reported conflicting results concerning different pain perceptions of men and women. Recent research found higher pain levels in men after major surgery, contrasted by women after minor procedures. This trial investigates differences in self-reported preoperative pain intensity between genders before surgery.Patients were enrolled in 2011 and 2012 presenting for preoperative evaluation at the anesthesiological assessment clinic at Charité University hospital. Out of 5102 patients completing a computer-assisted self-assessment, 3042 surgical patients with any preoperative pain were included into this prospective observational clinical study. Preoperative pain intensity (0–100 VAS, visual analog scale) was evaluated integrating psychological cofactors into analysis.Women reported higher preoperative pain intensity than men with median VAS scores of 30 (25th–75th percentiles: 10–52) versus 21 (10–46) (P < 0.001). Adjusted multiple regression analysis showed that female gender remained statistically significantly associated with higher pain intensity (P < 0.001). Gender differences were consistent across several subgroups especially with varying patterns in elderly. Women scheduled for minor and moderate surgical procedures showed largest differences in overall pain compared to men.This large clinical study observed significantly higher preoperative pain intensity in female surgical patients. This gender difference was larger in the elderly potentially contradicting the current hypothesis of a primary sex-hormone derived effect. The observed variability in specific patient subgroups may help to explain heterogeneous findings of previous studies.

Sustainability and Clinical Effectiveness of Inpatient Rehabilitation in Painful Shoulder Diseases

“…Compared with the observational study of Tafelski, et al, we found no difference neither between the genders nor in dependence on age [13]. Tafelski, et al found that the difference of pain-intensity regarding genders is age-dependent.…”

Sex differences in the consumption of over-the-counter analgesics among amateur volleyball players

“…Sex differences of experimentally induced pain have been described in the literature, reporting that women perceive physically or chemically induced pain more strongly than men [49-54, 80, 81]. These differences are not restricted to tactile perception and can be supposed for the whole body [82][83][84]. Regarding sex differences in clinical pain there are studies analysing pre-operative pain; a sex difference was found with greater pain scores for females than males [85][86][87][88][89], which was still detectable on the first post-operative day [86].…”

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“…We have not performed an anti-spike/anti-nucleocapsid antibody test to identify all previously infected participants, which may have biased the outcome of antibody level. Furthermore, potential interactions of variables were not addressable in this analysis due to limited sample size; however, sexes may differ in more dimensions such as pain-, infection-, or vaccination response [ 36 , 37 , 38 ].…”