#pain research

All articles tagged with "pain research"

Nature Medicine published global age- and sex-specific reference curves for pain on 5 October 2026.
The dataset covers 6.1 million individuals across 118 countries, making it one of the broadest pain datasets assembled.
Curves are broken out for 11 separate pain sites rather than a single pooled pain measure.
Reference curves function like growth charts, letting an individual's pain be positioned against a population distribution.

DT Editorial Team·Oct 6, 2026·via nature.com

A global analysis published in Nature Medicine examined self-reported pain data from 6,125,459 people ages 5 to over 100 across 118 countries and territories, collected between 1990 and 2025.
Pain prevalence varied from about 2% for facial pain to roughly 40% for back pain across the 11 body areas studied.
Women reported pain more often than men in all 11 body areas, with the widest gaps for facial pain, headaches, and stomach or abdominal pain.
Pain prevalence rose most sharply before age 55, with headaches and abdominal pain peaking earlier in life while back, hip and knee pain kept increasing with age.

DT Editorial Team·Oct 5, 2026·via medicalxpress.com

Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, Sungkyunkwan University and other institutions developed a neuroimaging analysis framework called integrated effective connectivity (iEC).
The approach aims to estimate how activity in one brain region influences activity in another, moving beyond the statistical associations produced by conventional fMRI analysis.
The work, published in Nature Neuroscience, includes a signal flow hierarchy map for the resting brain.
The team produced functional hierarchy maps for three states: movie watching, resting and tonic pain, and tracked state-dependent changes in hierarchy levels.

DT Editorial Team·Sep 22, 2026·via medicalxpress.com