Gout Pal Interactive

Following hot on the heels of my article about rasburicase and gout, I’ve just received a note about another aspect of using rasburicase.

As I mentioned, rasburicase lowers uric acid by catalyzing its oxidation to allantoin. This raises the problem of monitoring the patients uric acid levels. Once a blood sample has been drawn, the rasburicase continues to act on the sample. Unless this reaction is stopped, the samples will give false low uric acid readings. In fact, samples left at room temperature show 100% breakdown of uric acid after 4 hours.

A team in Belgium, Europe have proposed a solution to this. In a letter to Clinical Chemistry, the team report that treatment with perchloric acid slowed the breakdown of uric acid in samples. There was still a loss of up to 5%, but this compares favorably with up to 30% loss under the standard recommended procedure of keeping samples cooled.

Though it is unlikely that rasburicase will ever be a common treatment for gout, it is worth bearing this process in mind if it ever is.

I also wonder if this applies to the similar drug, puricase that is being developed specifically for reducing uric acid in gout patients. Have you looked closely enough at the puricase project to know the answer to this? If so, please tell me, and my readers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Gout Cures.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.