Blood pressure, gender, and parental hypertension are factors in baseline and poststress pain sensitivity in normotensive adults

We studied 38 men and 36 women to learn whether a brief speech stressor reduced normotensive humans thermal pain sensitivity, whether baseline and poststress pain threshold and tolerance varied with blood pressure (BP) and hemodynamic measures, and whether these relations differed by gender and parental hypertension (PH). PH-women with low resting BPs had lower baseline pain tolerance than did all other groups (ps < .05), and this group alone exhibited stress-induced analgesia (ps = .008). In women, pre- and poststress pain tolerance varied directly with rest and stress BP (ps < .05). In men, BP and pain measures were not related, but high cardiac index during stress was associated with low baseline pain tolerance (p < .01). The present findings support the hypothesis that pain sensitivity and cardiac stress response share a common mechanism, but they yield little support for the hypothesis that analgesic responses to acute stress contribute to hypertension etiology via an instrumental learning process. We are grateful to Robin Campbell for her technical assistance and to Dr. Alan L. Hinderliter for his assistance in screening volunteers for participation in this study. This research was supported by Grant R01-HL3t533 from the National Health, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, MD