Machine Learning Analysis Predicts A Person’s Sex Based On Mechanical But Not Thermal Pain Thresholds

This study used a machine learning workflow to identify a structure in the data that reflects the sex segregation of pain thresholds and can be used to infer a person’s sex from the individual pattern of thresholds to different pain stimuli. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki on Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects and was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Medicine, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. 125 unrelated healthy Caucasian volunteers (69 men, 56 women) participated in the study, in which pain thresholds to thermal, mechanical, and electrical stimuli were determined in nonsensitized and sensitized skin areas of the forearm.