Gout patients should always watch their uric acid levels

  With the improvement of living standard, the prevalence of gout in China is increasing year by year. According to the literature, there are 120 million patients with hyperuricemia and 17 million patients with gout in China, and a large number of patients appear to be untreated for a long time and have recurrent attacks. A study in 2009 showed that although the treatment rate of gout is high, it is not treated in a standardized way and cannot lower uric acid for a long time, resulting in recurrent attacks. The danger of gout is huge, and a variety of diseases are closely related to it, causing great pain to patients. The Third US Nutrition and Health Survey: Gout patients are prone to heart attack and heart failure, and high uric acid significantly increases the prevalence of hypertension, diabetes, stroke, kidney disease, myocardial infarction and heart failure. Blood uric acid levels are positively correlated with cardiovascular disease, and the higher the blood uric acid level in gout patients, the higher the chance of combined diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, heart attack and obesity. Gout increases mortality in patients with kidney disease. In the United States, 259,209 cases of severe kidney disease were investigated: the incidence of gout was 5% in the first year of dialysis and 15.4% within 5 years; gout can increase the risk of death of kidney disease patients by 1.49 times, which is the most important risk factor, and at the same time, gout can be combined with chronic kidney disease, which can cause joint disability and severe pain in severe cases; gout stones do not heal after surgery for a long time; and gout has difficulty walking in the late stage.  There are two fundamental reasons why gout is not cured 1. patients: patients do not pay attention to treatment in terms of cognition, there are non-pharmaceutical treatment, only in the early treatment and intermittent treatment (only in the treatment of attacks), do not adhere to long-term uric acid reduction, at the same time, because of fear of drug side effects, there is long-term abuse of painkillers and hormones.  2. Doctors: In terms of cognition, doctors are not familiar with the treatment routine and do not recognize the danger of high uric acid, thus causing a lack of attention to uric acid-lowering treatment, which eventually leads to the fact that clinically, patients with refractory gout are becoming more and more common. Therefore, “the only way to make gout patients pay attention to treatment is to repeatedly publicize and emphasize the danger of gout, and at the same time, it is important to “consistently achieve” the blood uric acid standard, which is the “gold standard” of gout treatment. The term “sustained attainment” contains two meanings: “sustained” and “attainment”, “sustained” means the continuation of uric acid reduction. The longer the duration of the disease and the more gout stones in the patient’s body, the longer the duration of uric acid reduction may be. “The longer the duration of the disease, the more gout stones in the body, the longer the duration of uric acid reduction.  According to the literature, the immediate benefits of “meeting” the blood uric acid standard are to reduce the number of acute attacks, reduce urate crystallization, stop joint damage, and reduce organ damage in gout patients. The lower the blood uric acid, the lower the gout recurrence rate, with less than 10% of patients with <300 μmol/L uric acid and 80% of patients with >540 μmol/L uric acid, eight times higher than those with <300 μmol/L. In an animal study, uric acid-lowering therapy was shown to improve insulin sensitivity and other symptoms of the metabolic syndrome such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obesity and hyperglycemia. Most notably, several studies have shown a protective effect of early uric acid lowering on renal function. Early uric acid lowering treatment prevents the occurrence of nephropathy, improves kidney function by lowering uric acid, and delays the development of nephropathy by lowering uric acid.  Patients who adhere to uric acid-lowering drugs have a lower recurrence rate of gout and a significantly higher survival rate than those whose uric acid does not reach the standard; those who stop the drugs in the middle of the treatment have a higher recurrence frequency, increased urate crystals and a lower survival rate with the increase of uric acid. According to the literature, the lower the blood uric acid, the faster the gout stone dissolution rate, the blood uric acid level and gout stone dissolution rate are linearly negatively correlated, keeping SUA below 240 μmol/L gout stone dissolution rate is the fastest, on average, patients can completely dissolve gout stone within 20 months.  For patients with refractory gout, non-pharmacological therapies should be emphasized first and throughout the treatment, such as strict control of high purine diet, soft drinks and fructose, abstaining from beer and liquor, drinking more water (the amount of water should make the 24-hour urine volume exceed 2000ml) and alkalinizing urine (maintaining the urine pH at 6.2~6.8). In addition, there are a number of aspects of drug therapy that need to be emphasized and require extra attention by clinicians and patients during treatment. "In conclusion, regardless of which uric acid-lowering drug or drugs are used, the earlier the target is reached and the more consistently it is reached, the better the prognosis is, and sustained uric acid compliance is the key to refractory gout treatment. It is worth noting that in the early stages of uric acid-lowering therapy for refractory gout, acute attacks of gout need to be prevented."