ArticleBritish journal of anaesthesia2025
Sex-specific genetics underlie increased chronic pain risk in women: genome-wide association studies from the UK Biobank.
Article in British journal of anaesthesia, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of Deep versus Moderate Neuromuscular Blockade on Postoperative Acute and Chronic Pain in Laparoscopic Gynecological Surgery.Journal of pain research · 2026Trial
- Pain in People Living With Obesity: Baseline Multidimensional Profiles, Prevalence and Biopsychosocial Factors From a Cohort Study.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Article
- Causal evidence linking chronic pain genetics to late-onset asthma via the nervous system.British journal of anaesthesia · 2026Article
- The cell-type-specific genetic architecture of chronic pain in brain and dorsal root ganglia.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2025Article
- A high-resolution genomic roadmap for chronic pain converges on glutamatergic neurons and C-fibers.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2025Article
- Sex-specific genetics underlie increased chronic pain risk in women: decoding the genetic architecture of chronic pain. Comment on Br J Anaesth 2025; 135: 401-5.British journal of anaesthesia · 2025Article
- Etiological basis for chronic pain genetic variation in brain and dorsal root ganglia cell types.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundChronic pain disproportionately affects women, but the reasons for this disparity are unclear.
methodsWe investigated this disparity from a genetic perspective using data from the UK Biobank, focusing on multisite chronic pain, which is highly heritable and manifests a sex bias.
resultsGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) revealed that women have approximately 4500 sex-specific causal loci for overlapping pains, four times more than men, accounting for their higher heritability. Heritability partitioning indicated that pain-related loci are primarily enriched in specific brain regions, but only in women. Additionally, 200 imaging-derived brain phenotypes were significantly associated with pain in women, compared with only six in men. GWAS of these brain phenotypes showed stronger genetic correlations with pain in women, particularly regarding cortical thickness and striatal volume. When disentangling pleiotropy from causation in genetically correlated pairs of brain- and pain-related traits, we found that the genetics of brain phenotypes are more often causally implicated with the presence of chronic pain in women.
conclusionsOur findings suggest that genetics play a crucial role in the increased risk of chronic pain observed in women.
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