Who Suffers Pain Best Men or Women

Today's short post from sciencedaily.com (see link below) somewhat dispels the myth that women are better bearers of pain than men. Of course, logically, this is nonsense because nobody suffers the same pain for the same reasons - it all depends on the severity of your condition. This especially applies to neuropathy patients. However, scientifically these findings suggest that there is very little difference between the sexes.

Pain tolerance levels between men, women are similar
Date:September 10, 2014 Source: Plataforma SINC
 
Summary:

Resilience, a person's ability to overcome adverse circumstances, is the main quality associated with pain tolerance among patients and their adjustment to chronic pain. This is the result of a new study that shows that the effect of gender on this ability is not as significant as originally thought.
 
Resilience, a person's ability to overcome adverse circumstances, is the main quality associated with pain tolerance among patients and their adjustment to chronic pain. This is the result of a new study carried out at the University of Málaga that shows that the effect of gender on this ability is not as significant as originally thought.

Over the years a number of clinical trials have shown important gender differences with regard to susceptibility to pain through illness, effectiveness of medications and recovery after anesthetic. Furthermore, these results coincide with general lore where it is often said that women tolerate pain better than men.

However, a new study led by researchers at Malaga University with the aim of analyzing the differences between men and women in terms of their experience with chronic pain has dispelled this theory, revealing that these differences are minimal.

Quite the opposite, it is a person's resilience -the ability to overcome adverse circumstances- that determines the high or low acceptance of pain, as it is related to a series of characteristics that provide the individual with resources to cope with chronic pain.

400 patients with chronic spinal pain (190 men and 210 women) treated in primary care centers took part in this study and the findings show more similarities than differences between the two sexes.

"More resilient individuals tend to accept their pain, that is, they tend to understand that their ailment is chronic and they stop focusing on trying to get the pain to disappear, to focus their energy on enhancing their quality of life, despite the pain," Carmen Ramírez-Maestre, the main author and researcher at the Andalusian institution, said.

"In this regard," continued Ramírez-Maestre, "patients who are able to accept their pain feel less pain, they are more active on a daily basis and have a better mood."

Fear of pain

Also, the findings, which were published recently in The Journal of Pain, showed that patients that feared pain also experienced significantly more anxiety and depression.

"However, this fear was only related to a greater degree of pain in the samples of men and this was the only difference found between the sexes," concludes the author.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Plataforma SINC. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
Carmen Ramírez-Maestre, Rosa Esteve. The Role of Sex/Gender in the Experience of Pain: Resilience, Fear, and Acceptance as Central Variables in the Adjustment of Men and Women With Chronic Pain. The Journal of Pain, 2014; 15 (6): 608 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpain.2014.02.006

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140910083339.htm

SPECIALIZED YOGA PROGRAM COULD HELP WOMEN WITH URINARY INCONTINENCE

An ancient form of meditation and exercise could help women who suffer from urinary incontinence, according to a new study from UC San Francisco.

In a study scheduled to be published on April 25, 2014 in Female Pelvic Medicine & Reconstructive Surgery, the official journal of the American Urogynecologic Society, UCSF researchers discovered that a yoga training program, designed to improve pelvic health, can help women gain more control over their urination and avoid accidental urine leakage.

"Yoga is often directed at mindful awareness, increasing relaxation, and relieving anxiety and stress," said first author Alison Huang, MD, assistant professor in the UCSF School of Medicine. "For these reasons, yoga has been directed at a variety of other conditions -- metabolic syndrome or pain syndromes -- but there's also a reason to think that it could help for incontinence as well."

Huang and her colleagues recruited 20 women from the Bay Area who were 40 years and older and who suffered from urinary incontinence on a daily basis. Half were randomly assigned to take part in a six-week yoga therapy program and the other half were not. The women who took part in the yoga program experienced an overall 70 percent improvement -- or reduction -- in the frequency of their urine leakage compared to the baseline. The control group -- or the group that did not start yoga therapy -- only had 13 percent improvement. Most of the observed improvement in incontinence was in stress incontinence, or urine leakage brought on by activities that increase abdominal pressure such as coughing, sneezing, and bending over.

Huang and her colleagues believe that yoga can improve urinary incontinence through more than one mechanism. Because incontinence is associated with anxiety and depression, women suffering from incontinence may benefit from yoga's emphasis on mindful meditation and relaxation. But regular practice of yoga may also help women strengthen the muscles of the pelvic floor that support the bladder and protect against incontinence.

"We thought this would be a good opportunity for women to use yoga to become more aware of and have more control over their pelvic floor muscles," Huang said.

Approximately 25 million adults in America suffer from some form of urinary incontinence, according to the National Association for Continence. Up to 80 percent of them are women. Urinary incontinence becomes more common as women age, although many younger women also suffer from it.

"We specifically developed a yoga therapy program that would be safe for older women, including women with minor mobility limitations," Huang said. "So we were partially assessing safety of this program for older women who are at highest risk for having incontinence in the first place."

Not all types of yoga may help with urinary incontinence. The yoga program used in the study was specially designed with input from yoga consultants Leslie Howard and Judith Hanson Lasater, who have experience teaching women to practice yoga in ways that will improve their pelvic health. Still Huang and her colleagues believe that many women in the community can be taught to preserve pelvic muscle strength and prevent incontinence.

"It would be a way for women to gain more control over their pelvic floor muscles without having to go through traditional costly and time-intensive rehabilitation therapy," Huang said.

Men were not included in this study because urinary incontinence in men is often related to problems related to the prostate, which may be less likely to improve with yoga. Huang and her colleagues hope to eventually build on this study and double the length of the study to 12 weeks.

PREGNANT WOMEN INVOLVE PARENT IN ABORTION WHEN ANTICIPATING SUPPORT

When an adolescent wants to terminate a pregnancy, how does she decide whether to talk to a parent? A recent study from the Section of Family Planning and Contraceptive Research at the University of Chicago found that pregnant teens will turn to parents and adults who are engaged in their lives and who will offer support, regardless of her pregnancy decision. Young women will avoid talking with parents who are less involved or may try to prevent them from seeking care

The study, published online ahead of print in theAmerican Journal of Public Health, explored the factors young women under age 18 consider when deciding to involve a parent. Researchers conducted interviews with 30 minors seeking abortion in Illinois, prior to implementation of the 2013 parental notification law. Currently, there are 38 states with laws requiring a parent to provide consent or receive notification before a minor can access abortion services.

"There's a commonly accepted idea that teens will try to hide their pregnancy or abortion decision. However, pregnant young women actually do turn to parents in the majority of cases," said Section policy researcher Lee Hasselbacher. "In our study, 70% of the young women involved a parent or guardian. They thought carefully about which parents and adults in their lives they could turn to for help in making their decision."

While each young woman's family circumstance was different, there were several common motivations for involving a parent. Factors favoring telling included close and supportive relationships, need for help with logistics like travel or payment, or experiences that made discovery of the pregnancy seem inevitable.

Minors expressed a range of motivations for not telling a parent about their abortion. Some teens worried that if their parent learned of their decision, it would dramatically change their relationship or feared it would even lead to anger or harm. Young women also discussed the lack of a relationship or presence as a reason they did not want to involve a parent.

One of the strongest findings was that among those young women who did not involve either parent, most were concerned that one or both parents would directly interfere with their decision to get an abortion.

"Policymakers should not force communication at the time of pregnancy; instead they should focus on supporting family communication long before a pregnancy or abortion decision," said Dr. Melissa Gilliam, Section Chief of the Section of Family Planning and Contraceptive Research at the University of Chicago and senior author on the study. "This study reveals teenagers will seek adult help."

WOMEN WITH Y CHROMOSOME DONT THINK LIKE MEN

Women born with a rare condition that gives them a Y chromosome don't only look like women physically, they also have the same brain responses to visual sexual stimuli, a new study shows.

The journal Hormones and Behavior published the results of the first brain imaging study of women with complete androgen insensitivity, or CAIS, led by psychologists at Emory.

"Our findings clearly rule out a direct effect of the Y chromosome in producing masculine patterns of response," says Kim Wallen, an Emory professor of psychology and behavioral neuroendocrinology. "It's further evidence that we need to revamp our thinking about what we mean by 'man' and 'woman.'"

Wallen conducted the research with Stephan Hamann, Emory professor of psychology, and graduate students in their labs. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Indiana University also contributed to the study.

The Y chromosome was identified as the sex-determining chromosome in 1905. Females normally have an XX chromosome pair and males have an XY chromosome pair.

By the 1920s, biochemists also began intensively studying androgens and estrogens, chemical substances commonly referred to as "sex hormones." During pregnancy, the presence of a Y chromosome leads the fetus to produce testes. The testes then secrete androgens that stimulate the formation of a penis, scrotum and other male characteristics.

Women with CAIS are born with an XY chromosome pair. Because of the Y chromosome, the women have testes that remain hidden within their groins but they lack neural receptors for androgens so they cannot respond to the androgens that their testes produce. They can, however, respond to the estrogens that their testes produce so they develop physically as women and undergo a feminizing puberty. Since they do not have ovaries or a uterus and do not menstruate they cannot have children.

"Women with CAIS have androgen floating around in their brains but no receptors for it to connect to," Wallen says. "Essentially, they have this default female pattern and it's as though they were never exposed to androgen at all."

Wallen and Hamann are focused on teasing out neural differences between men and women. In a 2004 study, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural activity of typical men and typical women while they were viewing photos of people engaged in sexual activity.

The patterns were distinctively clear, Hamann says. "Men showed a lot more activity than women in two areas of the brain -- the amygdala, which is involved in emotion and motivation, and the hypothalamus which is involved in regulations of hormones and possibly sexual behavior."

For the most recent study, the researchers repeated the experiment while also including 13 women with CAIS in addition to women without CAIS and men.

"We didn't find any difference between the neural responses of women with CAIS and typical women, although they were both very different from those of the men in the study," Hamann says. "This result supports the theory that androgen is the key to a masculine response. And it further confirms that women with CAIS are typical women psychologically, as well as their physical phenotype, despite having a Y chromosome."

A limitation of the study is that it did not measure environmental effects on women with CAIS. "These women look the same as other women," Wallen explains. "They're reared as girls and they're treated as girls, so their whole developmental experience is feminized. We can't rule out that experience as a factor in their brain responses."

The findings may have broader applications in cognition and health. "Anything that we can learn about sex differences in the brain," Wallen says, "may help answer important questions such as why autism is more common in males and depression more common in females."

REPRODUCTION LATER IN LIFE IS A MARKER FOR LONGEVITY IN WOMEN

Women who are able to naturally have children later in life tend to live longer and the genetic variants that allow them to do so might also facilitate exceptionally long life spans.

 Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) study published in Menopause: The Journal of the North American Menopause Society, says women who are able to have children after the age of 33 have a greater chance of living longer than women who had their last child before the age of 30.

"Of course this does not mean women should wait to have children at older ages in order to improve their own chances of living longer," explained corresponding author Thomas Perls, MD, MPH. "The age at last childbirth can be a rate of aging indicator. The natural ability to have a child at an older age likely indicates that a woman's reproductive system is aging slowly, and therefore so is the rest of her body."

The study was based on analysis of data from the Long Life Family Study (LLFS) -- a biopsychosocial and genetic study of 551 families with many members living to exceptionally old ages. Boston Medical Center, the teaching hospital affiliate of BUSM, is one of four study centers that make up the LLFS. The study investigators determined the ages at which 462 women had their last child and how old those women lived to be. The research found that women who had their last child after the age of 33 years had twice the odds of living to 95 years or older compared with women who had their last child by age 29.

The findings also indicate that women may be the driving force behind the evolution of genetic variants that slow aging and decrease risk for age-related genes, which help people live to extreme old age.

"If a woman has those variants, she is able to reproduce and bear children for a longer period of time, increasing her chances of passing down those genes to the next generation," said Perls, the director of the New England Centenarian Study (NECS), a principal investigator of the LLFS and a professor of medicine at BUSM. "This possibility may be a clue as to why 85 percent of women live to 100 or more years while only 15 percent of men do."

The results of this study are consistent with other findings on the relationship between maternal age at birth of last child and exceptional longevity. Previously, the NECS found that women who gave birth to a child after the age of 40 were four times more likely to live to 100 than women who had their last child at a younger age.

The results of Perls' study show the importance of future research on the genetic influences of reproductive fitness because they may also impact a person's rate of aging and susceptibility to age-related diseases, according to the researchers.

The study, "Extended maternal age at birth of last child and women's longevity in the Long Life Family Study," will be published in the January 2015 print edition of Menopause.

PROSTATE CANCER RISK REDUCED BY SLEEPING WITH MANY WOMEN BUT NOT INCREASED WITH MANY MEN

Compared to men who have had only one partner during their lifetime, having sex with more than 20 women is associated with a 28% lower risk of one day being diagnosed with prostate cancer, according to researchers at the University of Montreal and INRS -- Institut Armand-Frappier. However, having more than 20 male partners in one's lifetime is associated with a twofold higher risk of getting prostate cancer compared to those who have never slept with a man

Marie-Elise Parent and Marie-Claude Rousseau, professors at university's School of Public Health, and their colleague Andrea Spence, published their findings in the journal Cancer Epidemiology. The results were obtained as part of the Montreal study PROtEuS (Prostate Cancer & Environment Study), in which 3,208 men responded to a questionnaire on, amongst other things, their sex lives. Of these men, 1,590 were diagnosed with prostate cancer between September 2005 and August 2009, while 1,618 men were part of the control group.

Risk associated with number of partners 

Overall, men with prostate cancer were twice as likely as others to have a relative with cancer. However, evidence suggests that the number of sexual partners affects the development of the cancer.

Consequently, men who said they had never had sexual intercourse were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer as those who said they had. When a man has slept with more than 20 women during his lifetime there is a 28% reduction in the risk of having prostate cancer (all types), and a 19% reduction for aggressive types of cancer. "It is possible that having many female sexual partners results in a higher frequency of ejaculations, whose protective effect against prostate cancer has been previously observed in cohort studies," Parent explained.

According to some studies, the underlying mechanism of this protective effect is in reducing the concentration of cancer-causing substances in prostatic fluid or lowering the production of intraluminal crystalloids. It should be noted that for all participants, the age at which they first had sexual intercourse or the number of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) they had contracted did not affect the risk of prostate cancer. Moreover, only 12% of all participants reported having had at least one STI in their lifetime, which is few.

Male partners and increased risk 

The data indicate that having only one male partner does not affect the risk of prostate cancer compared to those who have never had sexual intercourse with a man. On the other hand, those who have slept with more than 20 men are twice as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer of all types compared to those who have never slept with a man. And their risk of having a less aggressive prostate cancer increases by 500% compared to those who have had only one male partner.

Parent and her team can only formulate "highly speculative" hypotheses to explain this association. "It could come from greater exposure to STIs, or it could be that anal intercourse produces physical trauma to the prostate," Parent said.

Avenues for further research 

Parent, Rousseau, and Spence are specialists in prostate cancer and are the first research team to suggest that the number of female partners is inversely associated with the risk of developing cancer.

"We were fortunate to have participants from Montreal who were comfortable talking about their sexuality, no matter what sexual experiences they have had, and this openness would probably not have been the same 20 or 30 years ago," Parent explained. "Indeed, thanks to them, we now know that the number and type of partners must be taken into account to better understand the causes of prostate cancer." Does this mean public health authorities will soon be recommending men to sleep with many women in their lives? "We're not there yet," Parent said.

CHOLESTEROL DRUG MAY BENEFIT DIABETIC WOMEN

Australian researchers have found that a cholesterol-lowering drug can lower cardiovascular disease risks by 30 percent in women with type-2 diabetes.

The five-year study of nearly 10,000 people with type-2 diabetes also assessed the drug fenofibrate’s impact on a range of lipoproteins and triglycerides (circulating blood fats) that elevate the risk of cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart attack.

They found that among type-2 diabetic patients with an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, fenofibrate cut adverse cardiovascular outcomes by 30 percent in women and 24 percent in men.

“The finding is good news for women. The study shows that fenofibrate reduced the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, or having a stroke or other adverse cardiovascular event more in women,” said Tony Keech from University of Sydney.

Fenofibrate stimulates the action of an enzyme that breaks down triglycerides and low-density lipoproteins.

Stimulating this enzyme increases the breakdown of triglycerides (another type of blood lipid) and low-density lipoproteins in the bloodstream and raises HDL cholesterol.

“Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death in women, almost three times more common than breast cancer,” said study’s lead author Michael d’Emden from Royal Brisbane Hospital.

The study appeared in the journal Diabetologia