Stress and Neck Pain Affect More Women than Men

A new thesis, successfully defended at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, concluded that neck pain is more common in women than men, regardless of occupation or age.

Neck pain can be really stressful and the irony is that stress is one of its main causes, especially in women.

Another important factor is the women's perception of everyday life as being more stressful than for men and, as a result, stressed young women develop more neck pain than men do.

Anna Grimby-Ekman, a postdoctoral student and statistician at the Sahlgrenska Academy’s Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, said that “physical work with heavy lifting or assembly work that involves a lot of arm-raising above shoulder height can lead to neck pain.

“By looking at a group whose work is less physically demanding, we can more readily identify other factors that could be implicated and perhaps explain the generally high incidence of neck pain,” she added.

So for her study, she has distributed a questionnaire to university students in Sweden, over a four-year period, AlphaGalileo reports.

The results of the 627 women and 573 men that filled in the questionnaire, showed that neck pain appears more in women than in men, and also that more women develop it during the four years of the study.

This last conclusion was rather surprising, because normally you would expect to have almost the same number of women and men to develop neck pain, since the group is young and all the members were in a similar working environment.

The same questionnaires were then distributed to a second group, representative for the computer users from the Swedish workforce, including 870 women and 834 men.

Even here, across the range of occupations covered, women reported more neck and upper pain than men.

After these results, there is one observation that imposes itself: in both the computer users and the students, neck pain is affected by psychosocial factors that include the demands of work or studying.

Grimby-Ekman said that “perceived stress was more common among the women students than the men, and appeared to play more of a role in the development of neck pain in young women than in men.

“There is an ongoing debate amongst researchers as to why muscle and joint pain, such as neck pain, are so common, and why this seems to be more prevalent among women than men.