Written by Paul Mahon
Friday, February 6th, 2009
Gout is uniquely known in the medical world as one of the most regularly recorded medical disease throughout history. It is frequently related to hereditary abnormality in the ability of a person’s body to excrete uric acid.
Your kidneys work very hard removing items from your body that can cause illness and even poison your body from the inside. If you don’t take care of your kidneys by doing things such as drinking 8 glasses of water a day to help flush toxins from your body then there is always the chance that they won’t be able to remove as much uric acid from your system as they should.
In milder cases, the person may only develop a condition called hyperucemia, a condition characterized by elevated levels of uric acid in the blood. Such a condition may not develop into arthritis or other kidney problems.
Uric acid that isn’t cleaned out from your system will become crystals and these crystals move around your body until they stop somewhere. Uric acid crystals often stop in joints, in fact they most often stop in the joint of the big toe. The crystals cause inflamation when they are enveloped in white blood cells, this is part of your bodys defences. While trying to protect your body, your white cells are actually helping to cause you the intense pain that is gout.
Gout usually attacks men over the age of 21, this may be partly due to the increased alcohol intake that starts after than age. Although middle age and later is when most men will start to suffer with gout, most likely due to the increase in obesity and the fact that people tend to stop watching what they eat after a certain age.
In the United States, there are approximately a million people who have the disease. It is more prevalent in men than women. In the males, the most at risk are those after puberty and menopausal stage in women. Elevated levels of uric acid in the blood or hyperuricemia in medical term, may point to a heightened risk of gout development but, medical studies has yet to uncover the relationship of hyperuricemia and gout. It is known however that many of those who have hyperuricemia will not necessarily succumb to development of gout. In contrast, there are many who have experienced gout attacks actually have normal to low uric acid levels.
