Sex Differences in the Incidence of Severe Pain Events Following Surgery: A Review of 333,000 Pain Scores

OBJECTIVE/BACKGROUND: Prior work has not addressed sex differences in the incidence of severe postoperative pain episodes. The goal of this study was to examine sex differences in clinical postoperative pain scores across an array of surgical procedures using direct comparisons of numeric rating scale pain scores as well as using the incidence of severe pain events (SPEs). DESIGN/SETTING: Retrospective cohort study of over 300,000 clinical pain score observations recorded from adult patients undergoing nonambulatory surgery at a tertiary care academic medical center over a 1-year period. METHODS/PATIENTS: To test the hypothesis that the number of SPE on postoperative day (POD) 1 differed by sex after controlling for procedure, we calculated Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel statistics of sex by count of SPE, controlling for type of surgery. ASSESSMENT TOOLS/OUTCOMES: Pain scores were collected from clinical nursing records where they were documented using the numeric rating scale. RESULTS: In female patients, 10,989 (25.09%) of 43,806 POD 1 pain scores were considered SPE compared with 10,786 (22.45%) of 48,055 POD 1 pain scores in male patients. This produced an overall odds ratio of 1.16 (99% confidence interval 1.11-1.20) for females vs males to report an SPE for a pain score on POD 1. Estimates of the odds that a given pain observation represents an SPE for female vs male patients after controlling for type of surgery yielded an odds ratio of 1.14 (99% confidence interval, 1.10-1.19). CONCLUSION: Female patients experience greater mean pain scores, as well as a higher incidence of SPE, on POD 1 for a variety of surgical procedures.