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 the other groups (ps <.05), and this group alone exhibited stress-induced analgesia (p = .008). In women, pre- and poststress pain tolerance varied directly with rest and stress BP (ps <.05).