Sex-specific genetics underlie increased chronic pain risk in women: genome-wide association studies from the UK Biobank.

Abstract

Chronic pain disproportionately affects women, but the reasons for this disparity are unclear. We investigated this disparity from a genetic perspective using data from the UK Biobank, focusing on multisite chronic pain, which is highly heritable and manifests a sex bias. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) revealed that women have approximately 4500 sex-specific causal loci for overlapping pains, four times more than men, accounting for their higher heritability. Heritability partitioning indicated that pain-related loci are primarily enriched in specific brain regions, but only in women. Additionally, 200 imaging-derived brain phenotypes were significantly associated with pain in women, compared with only six in men. GWAS of these brain phenotypes showed stronger genetic correlations with pain in women, particularly regarding cortical thickness and striatal volume. When disentangling pleiotropy from causation in genetically correlated pairs of brain- and pain-related traits, we found that the genetics of brain phenotypes are more often causally implicated with the presence of chronic pain in women. Our findings suggest that genetics play a crucial role in the increased risk of chronic pain observed in women.