https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4053
Yep, it shows that male mice are able to recover from induced mechanical hypersensitivity, while female mice were not. They hypothesised that this is due to the female mice getting around this by using adaptive immune cells, meaning this pathway still had the mechanical hypersensitivity, despite the original incision being healed. It is to be noted that, in the absence of adaptive immune cells, female mice did seem to use the standard glial-dependent pain pathway.
While this does show that female mice may recover from neuronal injury poorly, it doesn’t show that female mice experience more pain than male mice at a baseline. Similarly, this wasn’t done in humans and thus comparison becomes very hearsay, although it is to be noted that these mice have very similar neural structures to humans and that human research in this area is usually very sparse.
https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.69056
Very interesting study. Weirdly, by showing female mice inhibiting microglia-induced pain hypersensitivity with T-cells, it would imply that female mice have the capacity to reduce pain more so than male mice.
I unfortunately don’t have time to go over the others, but from those two it wouldn’t be without reason you could say that women likely use different pathways to signal pain compared to men, althoughyou can’t say that with anywhere close to certainty, as this wasn’t done in humans, nor was that the point of the papers.
In a sci-fi context it’d make perfect sense to present these findings as absolute in a JoJo sort of way, but I’d warn not to present these as factual as you did in the original comment. In a book, a disclaimer at the start would honestly let you run loose in what you say on these topics, and open the gates as to what you could get away with.
TL;DR the people handwaving these findings are wrong, but you shouldn’t take these studies as absolute in a human context
Disclaimer: This LitRPG comedy about a shapeshifter is a work of fiction. 😇👍
Possibly interesting: The following placebo-controlled clinical trials were for drugs that inhibited the microglial pathways (via p38 MAPK inhibitors and minocycline). They all failed:
There’s a problem with all of them: They failed to disaggregate results based on sex, which is exactly the problem I was talking about when I said “(we) need to account for (sex in medical studies)” earlier. This leads me to believe that these pain medications could have been useful for men, but probably not for women if the mouse studies indicating different pain pathways for each sex apply to humans.
Historically, research has assumed a largely “sex-neutral” model of pain. Yet mounting evidence demonstrates that men and women differ substantially in pain perception, processing, and response to treatment (7–9). These differences span the entire biopsychosocial spectrum, including neural circuitry, immune function, hormonal regulation, genetics, and social context (10). Understanding these distinctions is critical, as failure to account for sex as a biological variable risks overlooking mechanisms unique to half of the population and may lead to suboptimal or even harmful therapeutic approaches.
Okay, let’s go through these:
https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4053 Yep, it shows that male mice are able to recover from induced mechanical hypersensitivity, while female mice were not. They hypothesised that this is due to the female mice getting around this by using adaptive immune cells, meaning this pathway still had the mechanical hypersensitivity, despite the original incision being healed. It is to be noted that, in the absence of adaptive immune cells, female mice did seem to use the standard glial-dependent pain pathway. While this does show that female mice may recover from neuronal injury poorly, it doesn’t show that female mice experience more pain than male mice at a baseline. Similarly, this wasn’t done in humans and thus comparison becomes very hearsay, although it is to be noted that these mice have very similar neural structures to humans and that human research in this area is usually very sparse.
https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.69056 Very interesting study. Weirdly, by showing female mice inhibiting microglia-induced pain hypersensitivity with T-cells, it would imply that female mice have the capacity to reduce pain more so than male mice.
I unfortunately don’t have time to go over the others, but from those two it wouldn’t be without reason you could say that women likely use different pathways to signal pain compared to men, althoughyou can’t say that with anywhere close to certainty, as this wasn’t done in humans, nor was that the point of the papers. In a sci-fi context it’d make perfect sense to present these findings as absolute in a JoJo sort of way, but I’d warn not to present these as factual as you did in the original comment. In a book, a disclaimer at the start would honestly let you run loose in what you say on these topics, and open the gates as to what you could get away with.
TL;DR the people handwaving these findings are wrong, but you shouldn’t take these studies as absolute in a human context
Sure!
Disclaimer: This LitRPG comedy about a shapeshifter is a work of fiction. 😇👍
Possibly interesting: The following placebo-controlled clinical trials were for drugs that inhibited the microglial pathways (via p38 MAPK inhibitors and minocycline). They all failed:
There’s a problem with all of them: They failed to disaggregate results based on sex, which is exactly the problem I was talking about when I said “(we) need to account for (sex in medical studies)” earlier. This leads me to believe that these pain medications could have been useful for men, but probably not for women if the mouse studies indicating different pain pathways for each sex apply to humans.
There’s a whole article about this: https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2025.1730291