While this comment is very well written, I believe the reason you’re not getting a lot of upvotes compared to the other guy is because you didn’t cite a paper, which was the original request.
This sent me on an hour-long scour of a variety of papers, and it ended with me finding one titled “Sexual dimorphism in a neuronal mechanism of spinal hyperexcitability across rodent and human models of pathological pain” by Dedek et al.
In this paper, they take spinal samples from deceased humans and mice and compared sex differences after they doused them in BDNF. They found that the pathway responsible for uptaking BDNF was only active in male samples.
I think you’re extrapolating a little if you’re saying, based on this, that men solely use this pathway for pain and women don’t, but then again, I can’t tell what paper you’re looking at because you never posted it.
TL;DR: what you’re saying about BDNF might be true, but please post sources when making specific claims like that, especially when asked :3
PS your book sounds really interesting
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