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Stories for Reprint
Heat and Humidity May Cause
Gout Attacks
By Ferdous Al-Faruque, MARRTC Staff
Though summer is a good time to relax and enjoy the sun, sometimes the heat and humidity can become unbearable. A recent study has found that this is especially bad for people with gout as it can cause their disease to flare up.
Gout is a disease caused by too much uric acid in the body. Normally a person's kidneys remove excess uric acid from the blood, but most people with gout are unable to do so. For various reasons, their kidneys are not able to filter out uric acid, which leads to excess uric acid in the blood stream and an overall increase in the amount of uric acid stored in the body. When the body is unable to filter it out, uric acid can crystallize in the fluid inside different joints of the body, causing swelling and intense pain in those joints called gout attacks. "Even though we have treatments a lot of patients with gout have recurrent attacks, which are very painful," says Yuqing Zhang, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University. Most commonly, such attacks begin at night and involve the joint at the base of the big toe. According to the American College of Rheumatology, 1 in 100 people get gout, and most of them are Caucasian men.
Zhang and his fellow researchers from Boston University Medical Center have found that high humidity and high heat can increase the risk of gout attacks in people with the disease. They recruited people who said they had had a gout attack in the past year for the study through advertising on Google.com, which was linked to an online questionnaire about their condition. So far 197 people have completed the questionnaire. Based on the responses, researchers looked at the heat and humidity levels in the areas where respondents lived around the time when they reported having gout attacks. They found the chances of having an attack increased when humidity and heat increased.
The researchers aren't certain why this is, but they think it might be due to dehydration. "A possible biological explanation is that during hot and humid weather (people with gout) dehydrated or at least did not get enough water so their uric acid (levels) increased," says Zhang, the principal investigator of the study. The research concludes that people with gout should remember to keep themselves well hydrated to replenish any fluids they may lose to heat and humidity. "Drinking water is always good, not only for gout but for other diseases as well," says Zhang.
However, high humidity and heat are only two of the factors Zhang and his team are looking at as possible reasons for gout attacks. Other factors include alcohol consumption, injury and certain medications. Rheumatologists often advise people with gout to avoid consumption of alcohol, especially beer.
Once gout is diagnosed people are treated based on their individual needs. The most common treatments for an acute attack of gout, in which the joint is hot and painful, are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and corticosteroids. Colchicine tablets are used in some cases. Other medications such as allopurinol are given to lower the blood level of uric acid and prevent attacks.
People who have gout can take part in the study at https://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/goutstudy.
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