For many Canadians, December is a month filled with headaches. Not just the headaches of finding a parking spot at the mall, but the real head pain that comes from stress, anxiety and overindulging in eggnog.
A new survey conducted by Vision Critical, finds headaches are common for all Canadians, but women report them more than men.
In the previous week before the Tylenol Canadian Pain Survey was conducted, almost half of the 1,027 Canadian respondents (49 per cent) said they had had a headache. Of them, 40 per cent were male, 58 per cent female.
Another 21 per cent had had a headache in the last two to four weeks, while just 10 per cent said it had been longer than a year since they had a headache.
While Canadians consider themselves to have a relatively high tolerance to pain (35 per cent rated their pain tolerance between 8 and 10), almost 90 per cent had taken some kind of pain reliever.
Women are somewhat more likely to report intense pain from their headaches, the survey found. About 40 per cent of females rated their pain experience between 6 and 10 on a 10-point scale of pain, compared to just 30 per cent of males.
Dr. Gary Shapero, a Toronto-based family physician who also runs a chronic pain management clinic in Markham, Ont., says he's not surprised to hear that more women than men report headaches.
He says women are more likely to seek help for their pain, through a doctor or other means, such as massage therapy, whereas men are more likely to try to treat their pain themselves.
As for which gender really experiences more pain from headaches, Shapero says it's difficult to gauge.
"Pain is a physical symptom but it's also a subjective experience, because it's based on emotions, anxiety, it's based on past experience," he told CTV's Canada AM Tuesday.
"Men tend to focus more on the physical component of pain, whereas women tend to focus more on the emotional aspect of pain."
For the most debilitating kind of headache pain -- migraines -- women certainly experience those more than men, Shapero says.
"Women suffer from migraines three times more often than men," he says. "That's definitely due to the drop of estrogen that occurs prior to the menstrual period. That acts as a very potent trigger of migraines."
Shapero says someone who experiences headaches so severe that they can't carry on with daily activities or have to regularly miss social activities is probably experiencing migraines.
"It's whether it's disabling pain that helps me make the diagnosis of migraine versus tension headaches," Shapero says. "If the pain is disabling and it's not being relieved by over-the-counter medications, get to your physician and get the proper diagnosis and then get treatment."
Women are also more likely to experience chronic headaches, says Shapero, who defines them as headaches that occur more than 15 days per month.
"My experience in my chronic pain clinic is that I have much more women coming in than men," he says. But he admits that may be a reflection of the fact that women tend to seek help more often that men.
"Women are more likely to report pain and seek assistance as opposed to trying to grin and bear it," he says.
While men like to sometimes ignore their pain, there are certain kinds of headaches that should never be ignored by either gender, Shapero notes.
"If you're having a headache with neurological symptoms, such as lost vision or trouble speaking or altered level of consciousness, that's certainly an emergency and you should get to a hospital for a CT scan or laboratory test," he says.
