Gout – Overview

Transcript

So gout is one of the most common and most complex forms of arthritis, and it is a very painful type of arthritis. It can affect anyone and it’s characterized by very sudden sever attacks of pain, swelling, redness, tenderness, and oftentimes it’s going to affect your big toe and often the gout can attack the middle of the night, waking you up from the middle of your sleep. Some patients say they felt like their big toe was on fire. That big toe could be so hot and so swollen that sometimes the patients can even put on the bedsheets, make it intolerable, just the weight of the sheets. So this certainly is a very painful type of arthritis. When this happens, this is considered to be a flare. So gout management is to prevent flares and also really have ways where you can self-manage and have self-management strategies.

So you don’t have flares as often. So gout is caused by a condition that we call hyperuricemia. You have just too much uric acid in the body. The body makes uric acid from purines, which are the breakdown products of food that you eat. You have too much uric acid in the body, you may have what we call uric acid crystals, monosodium urate crystals, MSU crystals, that literally deposit into your joints, fluids, tissues within the body. So those monosodium urate crystals can actually deposit any joints in the body, but there are some common joints like the toe that have mentioned. The term hyperuricemia is, as I defined before, it’s just too much uric acid in the body, but everybody with hyperuricemia doesn’t always get gout. So we don’t quite know why that is. And usually that does not need to be treated if you’re not having gout flares.