Gout is a very painful condition that affects millions of people around the world. It’s a type of arthritis that happens when there is too much uric acid in the body. This acid forms sharp, needle-like crystals in the joints, which causes swelling, redness, and a lot of pain.
Most of the time, gout starts in the big toe, but it can affect other joints too. If it keeps happening again and again, it can damage the joints over time and make it hard to move.
Doctors have always thought that gout was mainly caused by high levels of uric acid in the blood. This condition is called hyperuricemia.
But here’s something strange: many people with high uric acid never get gout. In fact, four times more people have high uric acid without having gout than those who do. This mystery has confused scientists for a long time.
Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego may have found a missing piece of the puzzle. They discovered that a protein called lubricin, which helps joints move smoothly, might play a big role in gout.
Lubricin is a natural lubricant in the joints. It coats the surface of the joints to help them move without friction. It also controls certain immune cells that cause swelling and pain. What the scientists found is that when there isn’t enough lubricin in the joint fluid, it can lead to gout or make it worse.
The researchers studied a woman who had very bad gout in her joints, but surprisingly, her blood didn’t have high uric acid. This was unusual because most gout patients have high uric acid in both their blood and joints. When they looked more closely, they found that her joint fluid had very low levels of lubricin.
Under normal conditions, lubricin helps prevent uric acid from forming harmful crystals in the joints. It also helps control how much uric acid the body makes by slowing down an enzyme called xanthine oxidase. Without enough lubricin, the joint may produce more uric acid, and crystals are more likely to form.
To see if this was common, the scientists checked the joint fluid of regular gout patients. They found that they also had low levels of lubricin.
This led to an exciting idea. Maybe some people are more likely to get gout because of their genes—specifically, the genes that affect how much lubricin their body makes. This could explain why not everyone with high uric acid gets gout.
These results open the door for new ways to treat gout. Instead of just trying to lower uric acid in the blood, doctors might try to raise lubricin levels in the joints. This could help stop the painful crystals from forming and reduce flare-ups.
This important study, led by Dr. Robert Terkeltaub and his team, was published in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatology. It gives us a new way to understand gout and could lead to better treatments in the future.
If you care about arthritis, please read studies about extra virgin olive oil for arthritis, and pomegranate: A natural treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.
For more information about arthritis, please see recent studies about how to live pain-free with arthritis, and results showing medical cannabis may help reduce arthritis pain, back pain.
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