Of all the causes of gout, I’ve just heard of the most outlandish (in every sense of the word). It’s the moon!

Now I’ve often thought of myself as a lunatic, but now I know there might be a scientific reason. Actually, this is not real news, as the study was published in 2000, but it has been cited a lot recently due to other lunar effect studies.

The study, “Gout attacks and the lunar cycle” by Mikulecky and Rovensky, mapped 126 gout attacks between 1972 and 1994. It found that gout attacks were higher during full and new moons. This coincides with the moons greatest tide effects.

No reasons are offered, and I’m certainly not going to provide one. In just the same way that I can provide no explanation to the mouthwash story from my reader on Your Gout Views page.

What causes of gout do you know about? Please tell me by commenting below, or via my Contact Page.

Are You Itching For Gout?

I wrote about gout and itching recently.
In fact this was in response to a message from a reader wondering if many gout sufferers experienced itching.

Perhaps I was bogged down with creating this interactive site.
I usually check through my sources, or google for information, before responding.
As soon as I looked, I found a few references to gout itching.

In particular, one source (http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/gout/goutintr.html) set me thinking. I’d been planning to review the bandolier information to check for useful snippets. Checking out the following paragraph about acute gout attacks gave me a few ideas:

A single peripheral joint is almost always involved in all initial episodes, and most often this is the metatarsalophalangeal joint between wrist and finger. Typically local irritation and aching proceeds to tissues becoming swollen, red, hot, shiny and extremely painful. The pain is often describes as the worst ever experienced. By 24 hours inflammation is maximal, and it then resolves slowly over a week or so, often with itching and flaking of overlying skin.

I’m a bit confused about the joint - I assume they mean the big toe joint, though I get attacks in the hand and fingers. Apart from this, it set me thinking about other people’s gout symptoms.

In keeping with my desire to find out how gout really affects ordinary people like us, I decided on a survey of gout symptoms.

Please fill in the form below. If your symptom is not listed, please add a comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.

Remember, this is not a completely scientific survey - it’s about how you feel. I’ve added slight and serious choices rather than any attempt at a scale of suffering. As a guide:
Slight means a symptom you have noticed might be connected with gout, but you cope with it reasonably well.
Serious means a symptom you are convinced is caused by gout, and it significantly reduces your quality of life.

The first question is about which gout symptoms you’ve experienced. The second question is about which joints were affected. Please tick as many boxes as you want.

If you think I’ve missed something from the survey, please let me know via the public comment box below, or privately via my contact page (button near top of each page). In fact, I’d love any comments or questions about gout symptoms.

I exclude tophi from this survey. I will do a separate survey on tophaceous gout soon.

Join the forum discussion on this post - (2) Posts

On GoutPal.com I’ve written about the signs and symptoms of gout.

I often talk about the individuality of gout. How it affects different people in different ways, and how gout treatments work differently from one person to the next.

gout symptoms are also very personal. The classic painful swelling of the big toe is not uncommon, but there are many other signs and symptoms of gout. As well as typical pain and swelling, I’ve experienced discoloration, numbness and tingling (pins and needles). I also have tophi, but I’m preparing a separate article on tophaceous gout and experiences with tophi.

I’d like to discuss these other symptoms to see how widespread they are. Please add your comments below.

The Sound Of Gout Toe Pain

Diagnosis of gout has never been easy. In most cases it starts with toe pain and a swollen big toe, but in many cases it doesn’t.
Where gout goes undetected, problems can build up - unnoticed and untreated.

Recent research includes ultrasound and a number of studies have looked at the effectiveness of ultrasound in diagnosing gout.A recent study comparing ultrasound to conventional x-ray has shown some remarkable findings. Not least of which is the ability of ultrasound to measure effects of gout even when the patient has had no gout pain.
ARD - Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, the EULAR journal, has just published a study from Dr Stephen A Wright and others online prior to publication. The objectives of the study, High resolution ultrasonography of the 1st metatarsal phalangeal joint in gout ,were:

1. Compare high resolution ultrasound (HRUS) with conventional radiography in the detection of big toe damage (erosions in the 1st MTPJs) of patients with gout.
2. identify characteristic sonographic features of gout.

The study found that ultrasound could detect tophi in many more cases than with conventional x-ray. Not only that, but out of 22 patients that had not been subject to an acute gout attack, ultrasound detected signs of tophi in 10 patients (compared to 3 with x-ray).

I hope that these techniques can soon become part of regular health screening procedures. Especially for those at risk of gout. Early detection and treatment will surely reduce the chances of serious gout toe pain.