BACKGROUND Gout is a chronic, inflammatory arthritis characterized by painful and debilitating acute/episodic flares. Until recently, gout has been regarded as a minor medical problem, in part because the associated economic burden has not been appreciated. Previous literature on this subject focused on the costs associated with acute episodes of gout rather than on the long-term medical and ec...

OBJECTIVES For most gout patients, excruciatingly painful gout attacks are the major clinical burden of the disease. The goal of this study was to assess the association of frequent gout flares with healthcare burden, and to quantify how much lower gout-related costs and resource use are for those with infrequent flares compared to frequent gout flares. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SE...

BACKGROUND The diagnostic golden standard for gout is to detect monosodium urate (MSU) crystals in synovial fluid. While some gout classification criteria include this variable, most gout diagnoses are based on clinical features. This discrepancy between clinical practice and classification criteria can hinder gout epidemiological studies. Here, the objective was to validate gout diagnoses (Int...

Gout is a disorder of purine metabolism characterised by hyperuricemia, deposition of monosodium urate monohydrate crystals in joints and periarticular tissues with recurrent attack of acute synovitis. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and gout are relatively common disease, but their coexistence is extremely rare. We report a case of 69yrs old female on presentation likely to have rheumatoid arthritis...

BACKGROUND Almost half of the patients with gout are not prescribed urate-lowering therapy (ULT) by their health care provider and >50 % use complementary and alternative therapies. Diet modification is popular among gout patients due to known associations of certain foods with gout flares. The interplay of the use of dietary supplements, diet modification, and ULT adherence in gout patients is...

Many studies have found that systemic inflammation plays an important role in the pathogenesis of atrial fibrillation (AF). Gout is a chronic systemic inflammatory disorder, but little evidence exists regarding whether the risk of AF is increased in patients with gout. The National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan was used in this study, and gout was defined as the occurrence of at ...

The natural history of gout typically consists of three periods in a continuum: asymptomatic hyperuricaemia, episodes of acute attacks of gout with asymptomatic intervals, and chronic gouty arthritis. The last decade has seen major advances in our knowledge of acute attacks of gout with the discovery of the pivotal role of interleukin 1 (IL-1); however, the mechanisms that trigger acute flares ...

BACKGROUND An association has been suggested between gout and erectile dysfunction (ED), however studies quantifying the risk of ED amongst gout patients are lacking. We aimed to precisely determine the population-level absolute and relative rate of ED reporting among men with gout over a decade in England. METHODS We utilised the UK-based Clinical Practice Research Datalink to identify 9653 ...

BACKGROUND Many different combinations of available data have been used to identify gout cases in large genetic studies. The aim of this study was to determine the performance of case definitions of gout using the limited items available in multipurpose cohorts for population-based genetic studies. METHODS This research was conducted using the UK Biobank Resource. Data, including genome-wide ...

OBJECTIVE Patients with hyperuricemia or gout often have metabolic syndrome. Few prospective studies have examined the risk of incident diabetes mellitus (DM) in patients with gout, and there are no data to indicate whether the risk of DM in gout differs by sex. Therefore, this cohort study was undertaken to examine the overall and sex-specific incidence rates of DM in patients with gout. MET...