Gout was a hot topic in late 2010 at the American College of Rheumatology Annual Scientific Meeting in Atlanta. Researchers from around the world shared their latest findings on this type of arthritis that occurs when uric acid builds up in the body and crystallizes in the joints, causing intense pain, inflammation, stiffness and swelling.

One finding, written about in the March-April 2011 issue of Arthritis Today, is that sugary beverages including orange juice can greatly increase a woman’s risk of getting gout.

Here’s what else researchers at the conference had to say about the disease.

Gout’s On the Rise

The number of people with gout more than doubled between the 1960s and 1990s, but Yanyan Zhu, PhD, a research assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, wanted to find out what’s happened since then. So Zhu compared a survey of more than 18,000 people taken between 198 to 1994 with a survey of about 5,700 people gathered between 2007 to 2008.

By the latter time period, 8.3 million Americans – or 4 percent of U.S. adults – had gout. This was up from 2.7 percent between 1988 to 1994. “These findings indicate that the prevalence of gout continues to be substantial in the new millennium,” Zhu says.

Hyperuricemia is a condition that’s often the precursor to gout because it’s marked by higher than normal levels of uric acid in the blood. Between the two time periods, instances of hyperuricemia increased by 3.2 percent. Researchers think risk factors like obesity and high blood pressure helped drive the increase.

“Better management of these factors could help prevent further rise in the disease burden of gout and hyperuricemia and other associated complications in the U.S.” Zhu says.

Uric Acid Linked With Hypertension

While Zhu suggested that high blood pressure may be a cause of hyperuricemia and gout, another study presented at the conference suggested that high uric acid may put you at risk of developing high blood pressure.

Boston Medical Center rheumatologist Peter Grayson, MD, and his research team analyzed information on more than 55,000 participants from 18 studies that included information on uric acid levels and high blood pressure. In doing so, Dr. Grayson discovered that people with hyperuricemia were 40 percent more likely to have high blood pressure than people with normal uric acid levels.

“It suggests that this is an entirely new risk factor for developing high blood pressure, in addition to the ones we’ve known about for a long time,” Dr. Grayson explains. “But whether it causes high blood pressure remains to be seen.”

The researchers also found that if you are younger, female or African American and you have high uric acid levels, then you are also more at risk of developing high blood pressure.

Gout Meds May Protect the Heart

The association between high uric acid levels and cardiovascular disease has long been known, but researchers from Taiwan found that drugs designed to prevent gout flares might also have the added benefit of keeping gout patients from dying of cardiovascular disease.

Researchers analyzed data from people with high uric acid levels, those on urate-lowering therapies and those with cardiovascular disease. They found that urate-lowering therapy reduced participants’ risk of cardiovascular disease by 44 percent, reduced the risk of dying from a stroke by 58 percent, reduced the risk of death from hemorrhagic stroke by 88 percent and reduced the risk of death from high blood pressure by 71 percent.

Researchers also discovered the protective effect increased when people stayed on these drugs for more than a year.

“Our study suggests patients with hyperuriemia should be treated more aggressively and persistently than we previously thought, because urate-lowering therapy [may help] prevent not only gout, but also cardiovascular diseases,”explains Jiunn-Horng Chen, MD, PhD, an assistant professor at Taiwan's China Medical University and a rheumatologist at China Medical University Hospital in Taichung.