Pain follows cycle
From Atlanta, at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
The rise and fall of estrogen during a female’s menstrual cycle may change her perception of pain, according to an experiment on rats.
Studies have shown that women tend to report more-intense and longer-lasting pain than men do, but the reason for this difference hasn’t been clear. Nicole Amador of the City University of New York and her colleagues suspected that female-sex hormones could make women more sensitive to pain.