Gout – Treatment

Transcript

So gout is a disease that can really be effectively treated and managed with good medical therapy and some self-management strategies. We certainly want to get your urate level on your blood test less than six, and gout treatment really focuses on two approaches. First, we want to reduce the flares, those painful flares, and then have a long term goal where we could keep your blood levels low so you don’t have flares. Now for acute flare when you’re having the sudden pain, there are medications like colchicine, anti-inflammatories, steroids, that we can give you as first-line therapy. And there are other options too. IL 1 inhibitors, ACTH hormones as well. So there are some medicines that you can get right away if you’re in pain. And then long-term, what we want to do is what we call urate lowering therapy.

We wanna just lower that burden and medications like allopurinol, febuxostat, IV pegloticase are all great options for patients for chronic treatment. So that way you don’t have to have so many painful flares and miss days at work, or miss your daily activities. And certainly if once your gout is under good control, there are ways to get rid of those big bulky, lumpy deposits. However, it’s always recommended that the gout is under good control before you do surgery because if your serum urate levels are not at goal, then you’ll continue to deposit into the same joint.