How common is pain at your age? A chart built from 6.1 million people

About 30% of five-year-olds report some bodily pain. Among people 100 and older, it's about 70%.

Those figures come from a Nature Medicine study that pooled self-reported pain from 6,125,459 people in 118 countries and territories, drawn from 902 population surveys collected between 1990 and 2025. The aim was a set of reference curves, something like a children's growth chart, showing how common pain is at each age.

Back pain topped the list at around 40%, and facial pain was rarest, at about 2%. Women reported more pain at all 11 body sites, and the gap widened for severe pain: their risk of high-intensity pain was about 1.5 times men's.

Place mattered as much as sex. At 80 and older, any bodily pain was 30.6 percentage points more common in the least developed settings than in the most developed. Smoking, obesity, and low income together accounted for an estimated 18.3% of the global pain burden, from 12.6% in sub-Saharan Africa to 27.1% in eastern Europe. Those estimates rest on associations, so they don't show that removing those factors would remove the pain.

The curves also don't follow anyone through life. Most of the data compare different people at different ages, gathered by surveys that worded questions differently and asked about different stretches of time. Some regions and age groups were thinly covered.