Omnia LifestyleResearch, read slowly
6.1 million people in 118 countries were asked the same question: where does it hurt? Their answers trace how pain arrives, peaks and settles across a life, and why it lands harder on women.
Ten scenes. About eight minutes. Scroll at your own pace.
Pain is the leading cause of disability in the world, yet there has never been a common yardstick for how much of it people carry at each age. Most estimates count diagnoses, which misses pain that never reaches a doctor.
So researchers led from McGill University in Montreal pooled the answers of 6,125,459 people, aged 5 to over 100, from 902 surveys and studies run between 1990 and 2025 in 118 countries. They translated every study's wording into the same eleven body sites. The result was published in Nature Medicine on 5 October 2026.
Head, face, neck or shoulder, chest, stomach, back, elbow, hand or wrist, hip, knee, foot or ankle.
How common pain was depended heavily on where it was. Across all ages, facial pain was the rarest, at about 2%. Back pain was the most common, at about 40%.
Keep scrolling and the figures age, from 5 to 100. The glow at each site shows the share of people who reported pain there. At 5, about three in ten girls and a quarter of boys already report pain somewhere.
Stomach pain is a young person's pain. In women it peaks at around 23, then fades for the rest of life.
Headache peaks next. Around 34, about 37% of women report it, close to twice the rate in men.
By 55, most of a lifetime's pain has arrived. Across sites, prevalence rose most steeply before this age, which suggests prevention should start earlier than most health systems assume.
Seven of the eleven sites rise, peak and fall. Elbow pain peaks at about 59, neck and shoulder at about 62.
Back, hip and knee keep climbing. These are the sites that carry our weight, and for women they are still rising at 100.
At 100, about 74% of women and 59% of men report pain somewhere in the body.
The study's purpose was a yardstick: a way to see how any group compares with everyone else. Try it on yourself. Tap where you have had pain in the past month, then set your age.
Nothing you choose leaves this page. This is not a diagnosis; new, severe or unexplained pain should be checked by your GP.
Taken across all ages, women reported more pain than men at all eleven sites, from 8% to 83% more likely depending on the site. The widest gaps were for facial pain, headache and stomach pain. For pain anywhere in the body, women were 16% more likely to report it.
The more serious the pain, the wider the gap. For high-intensity pain, rated 7 or more out of 10, women were 52% more likely to report it.
For widespread pain, felt in at least four of five body regions, women were 50% more likely. The study does not explain why. Earlier research points to biological, hormonal, psychological and social factors, including how pain is reported (Mogil, 2012).
WomenMenEach dot is one person in a hundred, aged 50.
Lay the eleven curves side by side and the shapes tell the story: early peaks for stomach and head, a midlife arch for the upper body, a long climb for the joints that bear weight.
Circles mark each curve's peak for women and men. The full figures are in the table at the end.
In early adulthood, people reported broadly similar amounts of pain wherever they lived. Then the paths split.
In the countries with the lowest human development, pain kept climbing into old age. In the highest, it levelled off. By 80 and over, the share reporting pain anywhere in the body was 30.6 percentage points higher in the least developed settings, and low back pain was close to twice as common.
Eastern Europe showed the largest late-life excess of any region, about 21 points above the global reference. That reverses earlier estimates that put more pain in wealthier countries, which relied on diagnoses that are rarer where few people see a doctor.
The researchers tested three factors that people and policy can act on. Switch them on to see where each one showed up on the body.
Compared with people who never smoked, people of normal weight and the highest income band.
Together these three accounted for 18.3% of pain across body sites worldwide: 27.1% in eastern Europe but 12.6% in sub-Saharan Africa. Where pain is heaviest, much of it comes from causes this study could not measure. The authors point to heavy physical work, infection and limited access to pain care and rehabilitation.
These curves compare people of different ages at one moment. They do not follow anyone through their life, and they describe populations, not you.
Studies asked about different periods, from the past week to the past year, in different languages. Children and the very old were thinner in the data, and the figures measure pain over a period, not how long it lasted, so they are not rates of chronic pain.
Being common does not make pain something to put up with.
New pain, pain that wakes you at night, or pain with weight loss, fever or numbness should be checked by your GP. For chronic primary pain, meaning pain that lasts more than three months without another condition that explains it, NICE guideline NG193 recommends supervised group exercise programmes and says psychological therapies can be considered. It also says a single course of acupuncture can be considered, delivered in a community setting and within a set cost, and it advises against starting several common painkillers for this kind of pain. Pain caused by another condition, such as osteoarthritis, is covered by separate guidance.
At our clinic in Chiswick, our practitioners work alongside your GP's care. We do not offer cures, and we will tell you if something other than what we offer is the right next step.
Doctor-led acupuncture, with a full consultation first.
Read moreAssessment-led treatment and exercise for joints, back and neck.
Read moreWhat 1,744 trials say about tai chi, qigong and musculoskeletal pain.
Read moreWhy people with ME/CFS, most of them women, are still being let down.
Read moreApproximate share of people reporting pain at each site, read from the published curves and rounded.
| Body site | Age 20 women | Age 20 men | Age 40 women | Age 40 men | Age 60 women | Age 60 men | Age 80 women | Age 80 men |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Back | 19% | 15% | 34% | 27% | 35% | 30% | 39% | 30% |
| Neck or shoulder | 11% | 9% | 22% | 17% | 26% | 21% | 24% | 19% |
| Knee | 8% | 8% | 17% | 17% | 30% | 25% | 38% | 28% |
| Headache | 29% | 15% | 36% | 20% | 24% | 15% | 14% | 8% |
| Hip | 4% | 2% | 13% | 8% | 22% | 15% | 27% | 20% |
| Foot or ankle | 5% | 5% | 14% | 10% | 22% | 16% | 23% | 17% |
| Hand or wrist | 3% | 3% | 10% | 6% | 19% | 12% | 20% | 13% |
| Stomach or abdomen | 17% | 9% | 14% | 8% | 10% | 7% | 8% | 6% |
| Elbow | 2% | 2% | 10% | 9% | 15% | 13% | 11% | 8% |
| Chest | 7% | 5% | 10% | 10% | 11% | 12% | 12% | 11% |
| Face | 2% | 1% | 2% | 1% | 2% | 1% | 1% | 1% |
| Pain anywhere in the body | 47% | 38% | 63% | 54% | 68% | 61% | 70% | 61% |
| High-intensity pain | 3% | 2% | 10% | 7% | 11% | 8% | 9% | 5% |
| Widespread pain | 2% | 1% | 6% | 4% | 13% | 8% | 13% | 8% |
Sources. Fillingim M, Tanguay-Sabourin C, Neuert L, et al. Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries. Nature Medicine, 5 October 2026, doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-04696-w (open access, CC BY 4.0; charts on this page are redrawn from its figures). The study team's Global Pain Benchmarking Tool. Mogil JS. Sex differences in pain and pain inhibition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2012, doi.org/10.1038/nrn3360. NICE NG193, 2021. Covered in the Guardian, 5 October 2026.
This article is for general information and is not medical advice. Speak to your GP or a qualified practitioner about your own symptoms.
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