Impact of Gender on Perceived Postoperative Pain

Postoperative pain is a common problem after surgical procedures with many patients afflicted worldwide. Fundamental challenges are the complexity of measuring pain appropriately, and the many associated possible confounders. Over the last decades, gender of the investigator has been identified as a conceivable bias in the assessment and management of pain in experimental, as well as, clinical research. However, to the investigators knowledge this issue has not so far been systematically investigated in a postoperative setting. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the gender of the investigator has an impact on the reported levels of pain intensity after acute or scheduled surgery. In this prospective paired cross-over study, two investigators of opposite gender independently obtained individually reported pain intensity levels in each study patient based on three different methods of pain assessment the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), the Numeric Rating Scale (NRS), and the Painmatcher® (PM) technique based on electrical stimulation, in a postoperative study setting at a large urban university hospital in southern Sweden.