Previous research has demonstrated that although women may find post-operative pain more intense than men, males are more disturbed than females by low levels of pain that last over time. In these studies, females had a tendency to rate the intensity of pain higher than males, but males had stronger affective responses following the surgical placement of intra-oral implants. However, these findings have not been investigated in an experimental setting. This experiment examined the pain responses of 20 healthy subjects (10 males, 10 females), who were subjected to capsaicin-induced pain on the face and ankle (on separate sessions). During the experiment, all subjects rated their pain intensity, unpleasantness, and anxiety on visual analog scales (VAS). In addition, throughout the experiment, heart rate was monitored every five minutes and mood was assessed once before and after the experiment. Finally, subjects also completed the McGill Pain Questionnaires (MPQ) once at the end of every session. Results revealed that although there were generally no statistically significant sex differences in the pain ratings during the experiment, there was a sex * time interaction with males displaying increasing anxiety scores over time with the capsaicin patch on the face while the anxiety scores of females decreased over time with the capsaicin patch on the face (F = 1.64, P = 0.02). Also, there was a tendency for the relative unpleasantness (unpleasantness/intensity ratio) to be greater for males than females over time on the face (F = 3.43, P = 0.08). Males and females did not differ in both the mean number of words chosen and the pain rating index of the MPQ for all categories. In addition, there were no sex differences for heart rate and mood for both the ankle and face regions throughout the experiment. Taken together, these results replicate previous findings that men may find low levels of pain more disturbing than women.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.79045 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Marchie, Alfonse |
| Contributors | Feine, Jocelyne S. (advisor), Bushnell, M. Catherine (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Faculty of Dentistry.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001976372, proquestno: AAIMQ88260, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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