Men and women expertise ache aid in a different way, and a brand new research might make clear why women are extra liable to persistent ache and much less aware of opioid remedies.
A current research from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, investigating meditation as a therapy for persistent decrease again ache, has revealed that males and women use totally different organic mechanisms for ache aid. Men primarily depend on the discharge of endogenous opioids, the body’s pure painkillers, whereas women rely on different, non-opioid pathways to handle ache.
Synthetic opioid medication, akin to morphine and fentanyl, are probably the most highly effective class of painkilling medication out there. Women are identified to reply poorly to opioid therapies, which use artificial opioid molecules to bind to the identical receptors as naturally occurring endogenous opioids. This facet of opioid medication helps clarify why they’re so highly effective as painkillers, but in addition why they carry a major threat of dependence and habit.
“Dependence develops because people start taking more opioids when their original dosage stops working,” stated Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., professor of anesthesiology and Endowed Professor in Empathy and Compassion Research at UC San Diego Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. “Although speculative, our findings suggest that maybe one reason that females are more likely to become addicted to opioids is that they’re biologically less responsive to them and need to take more to experience any pain relief.”
The Study Design
The research mixed information from two scientific trials involving a complete of 98 contributors, together with each healthy people and these recognized with persistent decrease again ache. Participants underwent a meditation training program, then practiced meditation whereas receiving both placebo or a high-dose of naloxone, a drug that stops each artificial and endogenous opioids from working. At the identical time, they skilled a really painful however innocent warmth stimulus to the again of the leg. The researchers measured and in contrast how a lot ache aid was skilled from meditation when the opioid system was blocked versus when it was intact.
The research discovered:
- Blocking the opioid system with naloxone inhibited meditation-based ache aid in males, suggesting that males depend on endogenous opioids to cut back ache.
- Naloxone elevated meditation-based ache aid in women, suggesting that women depend on non-opioid mechanisms to cut back ache.
- In each males and women, individuals with persistent ache skilled extra ache aid from meditation than healthy contributors.
“These results underscore the need for more sex-specific pain therapies, because many of the treatments we use don’t work nearly as well for women as they do for men,” stated Zeidan.
The researchers conclude that by tailoring ache therapy to a person’s intercourse, it could be attainable to enhance affected person outcomes and cut back the reliance on and misuse of opioids.
“There are clear disparities in how pain is managed between men and women, but we haven’t seen a clear biological difference in the use of their endogenous systems before now,” stated Zeidan. “This study provides the first clear evidence that sex-based differences in pain processing are real and need to be taken more seriously when developing and prescribing treatment for pain.”
Reference: “Self-regulated analgesia in males but not females is mediated by endogenous opioids” by Jon G Dean, Mikaila Reyes, Valeria Oliva, Lora Khatib, Gabriel Riegner, Nailea Gonzalez, Grace Posey, Jason Collier, Julia Birenbaum, Krishnan Chakravarthy, Rebecca E Wells, Burel Goodin, Roger Fillingim and Fadel Zeidan, 14 October 2024, PNAS Nexus.
DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae453
This research was funded, partly, by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (grants R21-AT010352, R01-AT009693, R01AT011502) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1TR001442).
