A systematic literature review of 10 years of research on sex/gender and pain perception – Part 2: Do biopsychosocial factors alter pain sensitivity differently in women and men?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This systematic review summarizes the results of 10 years of laboratory research on pain and sex/gender. An electronic search strategy was designed by a medical librarian to access multiple databases. A total of 172 articles published between 1998 and 2008 were retrieved, analyzed, and synthesized. The second set of results presented in this review (129 articles) examined various biopsychosocial factors that may contribute to differences in pain sensitivity between healthy women and men. The results revealed that the involvement of hormonal and physiological factors is either inconsistent or absent. Some studies suggest that temporal summation, allodynia, and secondary hyperalgesia may be more pronounced in women than in men. The evidence to support less efficient endogenous pain inhibitory systems in women is mixed and does not necessarily apply to all pain modalities. With regard to psychological factors, depression may not mediate sex differences in pain perception, while the role of anxiety is ambiguous. Cognitive and social factors appear to partly explain some sex-related differences. Finally, past individual history may be influential in female pain responses. However, these conclusions must be treated with much circumspection for various methodological reasons. Furthermore, some factors/mechanisms remain understudied in the field. There is also a need to assess and improve the ecological validity of findings from laboratory studies on healthy subjects, and perhaps a change of paradigm needs to be considered at this point in time to better understand the factors that influence the experience of women and men who suffer from acute or chronic pain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".