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Study maps pain across the lifespan using data from 6.1 million people in 118 countries
AI-assisted summary Written by WellCareChina with AI assistance and checked against the original article.
A study published in Nature Medicine on 5 October 2026 pooled self-reported pain data from 6,125,459 participants across 902 population-based sources in 118 countries to build reference curves for pain across the lifespan. Pain prevalence ranged from about 2% for facial pain to about 40% for back pain, and was consistently higher in women at all 11 body sites examined. The authors also released an open platform for positioning other datasets against these global norms.
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