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Redheads, apparently, have an advantage: They experience pleasure and pain differently than others.
Redheads make up less than 2% of the global population, according to Ripley’s, while only about 4% to 5% of the world’s population carry the red hair gene.
Professor Irene Tracey, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford — who also happens to be known as the “Queen of Pain” — shared how difficult it can be to study pain.
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“Pain is subjective, it’s a private experience that you can’t really objectify, it’s an oddity in its own self,” she told Radio4’s Today, according to the BBC News.
“The holy grail is to eradicate what we call bad pain, chronic pain, and actually target it at the right level and remove that suffering for patients,” Tracey explained.
“You don’t want to remove the good pain, but you do want to eradicate the bad pain,” she added, calling chronic pain “one of the largest problems in the developed world.”
Tracey asked rhetorically, “Is there a genetic difference between people having different types of pain — men, women?” before turning to redheads.
“There’s often a comment about women with ginger hair, versus not, having that different genetic basis for how they experience the threshold for pain.”
According to one report, published in the medical journal Anesthesiology, redheads’ pain thresholds were linked to the mutations of melanocortin 1 receptor, which partially switches off a sensory receptor.
That changes the balance between tolerance and sensitivity depending on the type of pain experienced.
The study found that while pain and pain tolerance were similar in red-haired and dark-haired women, redheads are more sensitive to thermal pain.
The hair gene mutation in redheads modulate pain sensitivity, researchers concluded.
Scientists have recognized that redheads also experience pleasure differently.
A study from the University of Hamburg noted that redheaded women have more and better sex than women with other hair colours, the Daily Mail reported.
“The research shows that the fiery redhead certainly lives up to her reputation,” Professor Dr. Werner Habermehl said, noting that the study found that women with red tresses have the highest orgasm rate of all hair colours (41%), according to the Mail.
“The sex lives of women with red hair were clearly more active than those with other hair colour, with more partners and having sex more often than the average.”
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