What Is Gout – And How Can You Avoid It?
There are many gout signs and symptoms, but by far the most common one is acute pain the big toe. The pain can be so bad that even a slight movement of the sheet over it in bed at night can make it unbearable. This makes it very difficult – as you can imagine – or even impossible to walk anywhere or wear shoes, often requiring the individual concerned to elevate the foot. And while it may only be in your big toe to start, it can just as easily spread to other joints as well if it is not treated adequately.
Treatment may be medical, usually with allopurinol, or by home remedies for gout, including lifestyle modifications and a suitable diet for gout. Knowing which gout foods to avoid is extremely important.
Gout Symptoms
Some kind of remedy for gout may work, but you have to plan in advance, since signs of gout often arise without warning, suddenly making the joint in question painful. The symptoms can last from just a few hours to much longer, with attacks lasting as much as a few weeks at a time having been reported. Such long attacks can make life very miserable as the suffering is immense and the lack of mobility a real nightmare too.
A few people get flu-like symptoms with fevers and chills. There’s also the possibility of high blood pressure and a fast heart rate. Rapid treatment is the key to minimizing pain, and finding a remedy for gout is essential because otherwise permanent damage to the joints is possible, a condition which is obviously to be avoided at any cost.
The cause of gout is high levels of uric acid in the body which eventually leads to deposits of urate crystals in the synovial membrane of the joints. Without a suitable gout remedy, severe inflammation follows.
Lifestyle has been singled out as a number one cause of gout. This includes a poor diet for gout, being tempted by foods to avoid with gout, a lack of exercise, high sugar intake, a poor diet, stress, drugs and obesity all being very common in most cases of gout. If you have gout signs and symptoms get a proper diagnosis by visiting your doctor immediately.
He will test for elevated levels of uric acid in the blood and then suggest some drugs for you to take. However, these drugs are often quite harsh and have a few serious side-effects. Use them if you must, but be aware that natural remedies are actually highly effective forms of gout treatment. This includes strategies as simple as knowing which foods to avoid with gout.
If you find yourself in uncontrollable pain right now, some have found that Ibuprofen muscle rub can work wonders to lessen the pain immediately. For more information about gout treatment and diets, and in particular information about which foods to avoid with gout, be sure to review more of the informative articles on this website.
Treatment Of Gout – The Medical Approach
In the first instance, the treatment of gout is directed at the alleviation of pain and stopping the inflammation. In the longer term, it’s obviously necessary to try and prevent further attacks of gout, to reduce or even eliminate tophi and to protect the joint. All of these things can be done by working diligently on a target of reducing blood urate level. Essentially, it is necessary to keep the uric acid level in the blood below 360 µmol per liter.
Initially, pain relief may be gained from treatment with NSAID (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) such as diclofenac or indomethacin. Proton pump inhibitors are often prescribed simultaneously to avoid gastrointestinal problems such as ulcers or bleeding. Another alternative is colchicine, which can remove the information very quickly for many people, although there may be side effects such as nausea and diarrhea.
In the longer term, both men and women can adopt lifestyle changes that would improve their metabolism and avoid the deposition of urate crystals. Long-term therapy for the elimination of urate crystals needs to be carefully explained to most people, because it’s been discovered that a large proportion of patients do not understand that medications such as allopurinol are intended to eliminate crystal deposition, not cure the pain of an acute attack.
The traditional advice given to gout patients has always been to avoid purine rich foods and limit consumption of fructose containing drinks which apparently reduce uric acid excretion. Another aspect of traditional diet for gout, or certain gout foods, is the consumption of high levels of milk products and vegetable protein.
Needless to say, advice always focuses on lowering consumption of alcohol, and a common recommendation is to have at least three alcohol-free days in every seven. Mild physical exercise is extremely useful and so is careful weight loss. But the weight loss needs to be monitored and controlled because over-rapid weight loss can lead to ketoacidosis which may provoke an attack of gout.
As has been observed elsewhere, a purine poor diet may be counterproductive in several ways; it may also be rather ineffective. Typically a low purine diet would result in a 10% reduction in serum uric acid; since many men and women with gout show levels around 480 µmol per liter, a 10% reduction would leave them well above the target range of 360 µmol per liter.
Allopurinol is a long-term medication which needs to be carefully monitored and administered in a titrated scale depending upon the level of serum urate. Allopurinol causes a potentially fatal hypersensitivity response in 0.3% of patients. This reaction may occur long after the first administration of the drug. There are other alternatives which, as you can see here, may be more efficient. The recently licensed xanthine oxidase inhibitor febuxostat appears to be an effective alternative treatment for use in men and women with allopurinol sensitivity issues.