Does drinking alcohol cause gout? Answers to the relationship between drinking alcohol and gout, gout treatment, please bookmark

Nowadays, with the improvement of people's living standards and changes in lifestyles, drinking has become more and more common.

Long-term and heavy drinking can cause many health problems in the body, such as alcoholic hepatitis, gastritis, etc., and can also cause and aggravate diseases such as hypertension.

Gout is becoming more and more common nowadays. For people who drink alcohol, they are more concerned about whether drinking will cause gout, because gout, like hypertension, is an incurable disease and will bring many adverse consequences if not properly controlled.

Let’s learn about the relationship between drinking and gout.

1. Common gout

Gout is a metabolic disease caused by purine metabolism disorder. This disease mostly occurs in middle-aged and elderly people. It is more common in men and less common in women. If women develop the disease, it is mostly after menopause.

The disease attacks suddenly and the patient often wakes up in the middle of the night due to pain. The pain is quite severe and unbearable, more severe than rheumatism and rheumatoid arthritis, and is accompanied by symptoms such as local swelling, fever, and dark red skin.

The most common site of lesions is the metatarsophalangeal joint of the first toe, followed by small joints such as the ankle, fingers, and wrist, while large joints such as the shoulder, hip, and spine are rarely affected. The affected joints are mostly asymmetric, with single joints being more common in the early stages and developing into multiple joint lesions later.

Laboratory examinations use elevated blood uric acid (male ＞7mg/dl, female ＞6mg/dl) as an important diagnostic indicator, accompanied by elevated white blood cells and accelerated erythrocyte sedimentation rate.

2. Drinking alcohol causes gout

Does drinking alcohol cause gouty arthritis? This view was confirmed by an article in the famous medical journal The Lancet more than a decade ago. Studies have shown that when alcohol enters the human body, lactic acid is generated. Lactic acid hinders the excretion of uric acid in the kidneys by "competing" for urine, the excretion carrier, and causes hyperuricemia. People with high uric acid are prone to gout symptoms including gouty arthritis. Therefore, limiting alcohol consumption is an effective way to control gout.

In addition, a research article by scholars from Harvard Medical School also provides reliable evidence for this statement. Their study was conducted on middle-aged and elderly men who had never suffered from gout. The study lasted for twelve years and included more than 47,000 participants. The main purpose of the study was to verify whether gout attacks are indeed related to drinking. The results of the study fully confirmed the relationship between gout attacks and drinking. A can of 355 ml beer contains 12.8 grams of alcohol. A glass of 118 ml (less than half a paper cup) of wine contains 12.8 grams of alcohol. A small glass of 44 ml of spirits contains 14.0 grams of alcohol. According to this study, drinking 10.0 to 14.9 grams of alcohol a day will significantly increase the risk of gout. Moreover, the more alcohol you drink, the greater the risk. Compared with non-drinkers, those who drink more than 50 grams of alcohol a day have a 2.5 times higher risk of gout.

The relationship between drinking and gout

Chinese and Western medicine have different explanations, but they all end up being the same. Chinese medicine believes that the pathological basis of gout is the accumulation of phlegm and dampness, and alcohol can help dampness produce phlegm and induce acute gout attacks; Western medicine believes that the pathological basis of gout is hyperuricemia. Since organic acid excretion all passes through the common proximal tubule anion transport pathway, pyruvate in sugar metabolism turns to form lactic acid. Lactic acid is a competitive inhibitor of uric acid excretion and can hinder the movement of urate. Therefore, uric acid excretion is reduced, causing a sharp increase in blood uric acid. At the same time, the increase in lactic acid leads to a decrease in blood pH, causing urate crystals to precipitate and deposit in the joint cavity, triggering an acute attack of gouty arthritis.

3. Treatment of gout

At present, gout treatment includes two aspects: treating the pain and inflammatory response during gout attacks. There are two main methods for gout treatment: drug therapy and diet therapy. Patients must avoid alcohol and high-purine foods, such as beans, chestnuts, peanuts, animal offal, seafood, river shrimp, meat products, spinach, etc. Generally speaking, milk, raw eggs and other foods with low purine content can be eaten. You can also choose alkaline foods such as rice, corn, wheat, sorghum, and oats, or alkaline vegetables and fruits such as winter melon, cucumber, pumpkin, loofah, bitter melon, cabbage, pears, watermelon, and grapes.

Patients should drink more than 2000 ml of water every day to promote the excretion of uric acid in the blood through urination. Obesity is one of the main risk factors for gout, so overweight people should lose weight appropriately. Gout patients often develop tophi, which not only seriously affects the appearance of limbs, but also may cause joint deformity, dysfunction, nerve compression, skin ulceration, and long-term sinus tract healing, requiring surgical treatment.

In conclusion:

Dr. Bobo has many friends who, after being diagnosed with gout, continued to drink alcohol because of work and social activities, which led to poor control of blood uric acid, and then joint deformity and lameness. This is really not worth the loss. I hope everyone pays attention to their health and does not overdraw their health for social activities or other reasons, because good health will give you more possibilities in life.