Are Women More Likely Than Their Male Counterparts to Seek Treatment for Chronic Pain?

Chronic pain is a prevalent condition in the US, and can inhibit people from conducting daily activities. There has been debate regarding whether women are more likely to be diagnosed with chronic pain, due to a higher sensitivity to pain. Based on previous suggestive findings, we hypothesized that women from the NIH AllofUs dataset would seek chronic pain treatment at lower levels of functional impairment than men in similar health. Contrary to our expectations, gender did not correlate with chronic pain incidence. For every 1000 fewer daily steps, hazard ratios for incident pain were approximately 1.2 for both men and women. These results suggest that gender may not significantly influence pain perception in this context, but a higher step count is correlated with lower chronic pain incidence.