Читать книгу Brain Fitness for Women - Sondra Kornblatt - Страница 28

Being a woman is a pain—and that's not just an expression.

Researchers at Florida State University combined the statistics from over eighty different pain disorders and found that, compared to men, twice as many women suffered from pain disorders. “The burden of pain is greater, more varied and variable for women than men,” says pain expert Karen Berkley, PhD, distinguished research professor of neuroscience at Florida State.⁶³ One reason that women have more pain is unsurprising: disorders of the uterus can radiate pain.

Another reason is that women's XX chromosomes “lead to a fair number of painful diseases that men simply would not get,” says Donald Pfaff, PhD, author of Man and Woman: An Inside Story.⁶⁴

A third reason for more pain in women is surprising: women are more likely than men to have low blood pressure (59% of women have low pressure versus 43% of men), according to British physicians’ research.⁶⁵ In general, the lower the pressure, the greater the sensitivity to pain.

Men and women's brains also receive and act on pain signals differently. It's a complex story of neurons and receptors, but here's the simple version: there are neurons that cause partial amnesia to moderate pain, and males have more receptors for these neurons.

And then there is how hormones affect pain. The good news is that during childbirth, estrogen and progesterone combine to stimulate opiumlike particles and receptors on the spinal cord and significantly reduce a woman's perception of pain.⁶⁶ The bad news is that in ordinary life, estrogen has different receptors. Some decrease and some increase pain, and they are all scattered throughout the nervous system.

Women are not whiny wimps when it comes to pain. Men just have more resources in their brains to help them “suck it up” and ignore pain.