Pain researchers have now come to some consensus regarding the existence of small quantitative sex differences in the sensitivity to and tolerance of pain in humans. In addition, evidence is rapidly emerging that the sexes may differ qualitatively in their neural mediation of pain and analgesia. That is, different genetic factors, neural circuits, and neuromodulators may be relevant to pain processing in males and females. I will present several research stories—all from completely different levels of analysis and most displaying mouse-to-human translation—suggestive of fundamental sex dimorphism in pain processing, and the interaction of pain with other biological phenomena including social behavior, memory, and mortality.

Jeffrey S. Mogil, Ph.D., FCAHS, FRSC, is currently the E.P. Taylor Professor of Pain Studies and the Canada Research Chair in the Genetics of Pain, and the Director of the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain at McGill University. Dr. Mogil has made seminal contributions to the field of pain genetics and is a recognized authority in the fields of sex differences in pain and pain testing methods in the laboratory mouse. He is the recipient of lifetime achievement awards from the American and Canadian Pain Societies and the Canadian Psychological Association, and is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Research and the Royal Society of Canada. He served as Neurobiology Section Editor at the journal, Pain, as a Councilor at the International Association for the Study of Pain, and was the Chair of the Scientific Program Committee of the 13th World Congress on Pain.