What is Gout?
The word Gout is from Latin and it means drop. Known as "the disease of kings and the king of diseases," gout has been studied by physicians and has caused suffering in countless humans at least since the days of Hippocrates.
Gout afflicts an estimated 840 out of 100,000 people. Gout is strongly associated with obesity, hypertension, hyperlipidemia and diabetes. Gout is a condition with abnormally high levels of uric acid in the blood. It is characterized by recurring attacks of joint inflammation (arthritis), deposits of hard lumps of uric acid in and around the joints and decreased kidney function and kidney stones.
The joint inflammation is caused by deposits of uric acid crystals in the joint fluid(synovial fluid) and joint lining (synovial lining). Intense joint inflammation occurs when the white blood cells engulf the uric acid crystals, causing pain, heat and redness of the joint tissues.
Gout is an hereditary disorder, the intrinsic element of which is an inborn instability of nuclein metabolism which may remain latent, but under the influence of extrinsic factors, infections, becomes manifest, as betokened by local inflammatory tissue reactions in joints or elsewhere the specific character of which is attested by the associated uratic deposition. - Richard Llewellyn Jones Llewellyn, 1885
