Painstaking research reveals that women are not so tough

Women are not so tough after all, at least when it comes to pain. Research has shown that men cope better with it than women.

For years men have been told that, in terms of pain, nothing compares to giving birth and that if men were the ones having babies then one-child families would be the norm.

Happily, men will not have to prove themselves in this area, but if forced to face the challenge the gender would not do too badly.

It turns out that the genetic basis of pain is sex-specific, according to Assistant Professor Jeffrey Mogil, of the University of Illinois. He discussed his research yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science at a meeting in Washington DC.

He referred to several studies which have shown that not only are women more sensitive to pain, they are doubly unfortunate because their genes also mean they get less benefit from painkillers.

He described his research speciality as "pain genetics", the study of which genes were involved in the pain process. His goal was to understand why some people seemed indifferent to pain while others whined at the least pinprick.

He said there were "remarkable differences" between one person's tolerance of pain and another's.

His claims on behalf of men were supported by Prof Catherine Bushnell, of McGill University, Montreal, who used the latest brain-scanning equipment to examine how we process the pain response.

Her work involved applying a very hot, but not burning, probe to a subject's hand and watching what the brain did with the information and which path the information took.

She also assessed the person's qualitative response to the pain - whether it was bad or not so bad - and attempted to modify the response by allowing the person to focus on the pain or be distracted from it.

The subjects "rate the pain as more intensive when they are paying attention to it, as opposed to when they are distracted", she said.

And while her brain-scan work could show no difference between the sexes in terms of how the pain was processed, her experiments did suggest that women responded more quickly to pain and perceived the level of pain as worse than men.