Washington: Women suffer pain more intensely than men in virtually every disease category, according to an exhaustive analysis.

Stanford University scientists based the findings on a novel database that examined more than 160,000 pain scores reported for more than 72,000 adult patients.

"None of these data were initially collected for research, but this study shows that we can use it in that capacity," said Atul Butte, senior study author from Stanford, the Journal of Pain reports.

The medical literature contains numerous reports indicating that women report more pain than men for one or another particular disease, noted Butte, professor of systems medicine in paediatrics, according to a Standord statement.

"We're certainly not the first to find differences in pain among men and women. But we focused on pain intensity, whereas most previous studies have looked at prevalence: the percentage of men vs. women with a particular clinical problem who are in pain," said Butte.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-ever systematic use of data from electronic medical records to examine pain on this large a scale, or across such a broad range of diseases," he added.

"We saw higher pain scores for female patients practically across the board," said Butte. Those reported differences were not only statistically significant, but also clinically significant.