Autism and Gender Identity. I’m discussing the differences between gender identity, biological sex and gender expression. As well as how gender identity experiences may differ for autistic people(including info about autigender) and research about increased likelyhood of autism in gender diverse people. I finish by talking about my own journey exploring my gender identity.
Sex, Gender, and Pain: A Review of Recent Clinical and Experimental Findings http://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-59… “Consistent with our previous reviews, current human findings regarding sex differences in experimental pain indicate greater pain sensitivity among females compared with males for most pain modalities, including more recently implemented clinically relevant pain models such as temporal summation of pain and intramuscular injection of algesic substances.”
Gender, Coping and the Perception of Pain http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/… “A consistent pattern of effects was found, over both behavioral and self-report measures of pain. Compared to females, males exhibited less negative pain responses when focusing on the sensory component of pain (i.e. increased threshold, tolerance and lower sensory pain).”
Culture and Gender Effects in Pain Beliefs and the Prediction of Pain Tolerance http://ccr.sagepub.com/content/34/2/1… “Consistent with their beliefs, Indian participants had higher pain tolerance than those in the United States, and males had higher pain tolerance than females.”
The effects of experimenter characteristics on pain reports in women and men http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/… “Results indicated a significant main effect for professional status of the experimenter on pain tolerance. Subjects tolerated pain longer when they were tested by a professional experimenter.”
Man with fibromyalgia
Fibromyalgia is a complex illness to diagnose and to treat. There is not yet a diagnostic test to establish that someone has it, there is no cure and many fibromyalgia symptoms — pain, fatigue, problems sleeping and memory and mood issues — can overlap with or get mistaken for other conditions. A new Mayo Clinic study suggests that many people who have fibromyalgia, especially men, are going undiagnosed. The findings appear in the online edition of the journal Arthritis Care & Research.
More research is needed, particularly on why men who reported fibromyalgia symptoms were less likely than women to receive a fibromyalgia diagnosis, says lead author Ann Vincent, M.D., medical director of Mayo Clinic’s Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Clinic.
“Health care providers may not think of this diagnosis when face to face with a male patient with musculoskeletal pain and fatigue,” Dr. Vincent says. “These findings need to be explored further.”
Researchers focused on Olmsted County, Minn., home to a comprehensive medical records pool known as the Rochester Epidemiology Project, and used multiple methods to try to get at the number of people over age 21 with fibromyalgia.
They used the epidemiology project to identify just over 3,000 patients who looked like they might have fibromyalgia: Roughly a third had a documented fibromyalgia diagnosis. That amounted to 1.1 percent of the county’s population 21 and older.
In the second method, researchers randomly surveyed Olmsted County adults using the American College of Rheumatology’s fibromyalgia research survey criteria. The criteria include the hallmarks of fibromyalgia: widespread pain and tenderness, fatigue, feeling unrested after waking, problems with memory or thinking clearly and depression or anxiety, among other symptoms. Of the 830 who responded to the survey, 44, or 5.3 percent, met those criteria, but only a dozen had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia.
Based on the study’s findings, the researchers estimate that 6.4 percent of people 21 and older in Olmsted County have fibromyalgia — far more than have been officially diagnosed with it.
Fibromyalgia is more common in women, but men can get it too. The discrepancy between the number of people reporting fibromyalgia symptoms and the number actually diagnosed with the condition was greatest among men, the study found. Twenty times more men appeared to have fibromyalgia based on their survey response than had been diagnosed, while three times more women reported fibromyalgia symptoms than were diagnosed.
“It is important to diagnose fibromyalgia because we have effective treatments for the disorder,” says co-author Daniel Clauw, M.D., director of the University of Michigan Health System Chronic Pain & Fatigue Research Center.
Studies also show that properly diagnosing people with fibromyalgia reduces health care costs, because they often need far less diagnostic testing and fewer referrals looking for the cause of their pain, Dr. Clauw says.