A new study has found that women tend to forget pain much faster than men.
The research, conducted by a team from Canada's University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), also discovered men and women remember traumatic experiences differently.
The study was conducted on mice and humans to investigate this fascinating subject.The mice and humans were put in different rooms where they were made to experience pain by heat delivered to their forearm or hind paw.
Human participants were made to wear inflated blood pressure cuffs. They also had to exercise their arms for 20 minutes. Each mouse was injected with vinegar which was meant to cause a stomach ache for half an hour.
When the same procedure was carried out the next day, the males reported the heat pain was higher than the previous day.
Males exhibited stress and hypersensitivity when reliving pain again. Meanwhile, women showed no signs of stress when remembering old wounds.
"If remembered pain is a driving force for chronic pain and we understand how pain is remembered, we may be able to help some sufferers by treating the mechanisms behind the memories directly," lead author Loren Martin, Assistant Professor at the UTM, told a news portal.
Adding, "What was even more surprising was that men reacted more, because it is well known that women are both more sensitive to pain than men, and that they are also generally more stressed out."
