06/10/2026
Ever had your pain brushed off as “just a headache” or “just a bad tummy”?
A huge new global study has just put numbers around something a lot of women have been saying for years. Researchers pulled together pain data from more than 6.1 million people across 118 countries, including Australia, making this one of the largest studies of pain ever conducted.
The findings are difficult to ignore. Women reported more pain than men in every single one of the 11 body areas studied, with the biggest differences seen in:
👉 Headaches
👉 Facial pain
👉 And, unsurprisingly to a lot of women, stomach and abdominal pain
While the scale of the data is new, the experience behind it certainly isn’t. Women have been talking about headaches, pelvic pain, abdominal pain, gut issues and persistent symptoms for years, often while also navigating the familiar experience of having those symptoms minimised, normalised or explained away as stress, hormones, anxiety or simply something they need to live with.
Sometimes those things may genuinely play a part, of course, but “it’s probably hormones” should never be the end of the conversation when pain is persistent, changing or interfering with someone’s life.
The study also found that pain tends to build fastest between our 20s and mid-50s, which happens to overlap rather neatly with the years many women are working, raising children, caring for parents, managing households and carrying an impressive amount of invisible mental load. Headaches tended to peak in the mid-30s, while stomach and abdominal pain peaked much earlier, around the early 20s, before easing for many people later in life.
There is an important bit of context here. This research looked at self-reported pain, which means it cannot tell us exactly why women reported more of it. Biology may play a role, differences in the way men and women recognise or describe pain may play a role, and the reality is likely to be more complicated than any single explanation.
What the study can tell us is that women are reporting more pain across every body area examined, across millions of people and across countries all over the world. That feels worthy of curiosity, proper investigation and a little less instinctive dismissal.
If you are living with regular pain, one of the most useful things you can do is keep a simple record of when it happens, how strong it feels, where you are in your cycle if that is relevant, what else was happening at the time and, importantly, how much it interfered with your day.
There is a meaningful difference between telling a healthcare professional, “I get bad headaches sometimes,” and being able to say, “I’ve had headaches eight days this month, three woke me during the night and twice I had to leave work early.” The second gives them a much clearer picture of what is actually happening and can make it easier to have a useful conversation about what might need investigating.
Your pain does not suddenly become more legitimate because a study has finally put statistics around it, but research like this matters because it adds weight to something women have been describing for a very long time.
And perhaps, eventually, “women have been saying this for years” will be treated as evidence worth listening to before six million data points arrive to back them up.
Have you ever felt like your pain wasn’t taken seriously? We’d genuinely love to hear your experience in the comments. 💬
Source: Fillingim M, Tanguay-Sabourin C, Neuert L et al. Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries. Nature Medicine. Published October 2026.* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04696-w
