It’s a well establish fact that obesity is associated with many disorders. It’s a common knowledge that excessive weight can lead to the development of cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure and atherosclerosis just to name a few. In addition, obesity can increase a person’s risk of developing metabolic disorders such as diabetes.
Among the many metabolic disorders, gout has been increasingly prevalent over the past few years. Interestingly, this gradual growth has been consistent with the growing rate of obesity in the world. This can only attest to the real link between obesity and gout. However, not everybody knows this. In fact, many gout sufferers are still undiagnosed because of this. Because gout has similar manifestation with other forms of arthritis, individuals might not see their condition as alarming. Some might even consider their condition as something that can resolve in itself over time. But gout doesn’t. In order to cure it, you need to take conscious actions.
Understanding obesity and its effects on the development of gout is important especially if you are trying to reduce your risk of developing gout. You can only treat gout if you understand how it develops and how obesity speeds up its development. To further explain this connection, I’ve included an excerpt from an article entitled “Obesity obstacles: Why do obese people have gout?” in the succeeding sections.
Gout is highly common in obese people. The logic is simple: If you are overweight, you are putting extra pressure on your joints. This causes chemical changes in your body. Thus, it is believed that a fat person is four times more likely to get gout than a non-obese person.
People with high BMI readings also have higher uric acid levels, which eventually increases the risk of gout. This is because people who are overweight have high levels of uric acid in the blood, which sometimes forms solid stone or crystal masses, deposited in the joints, thus, propagating gout.
Obesity also heightens other risk factors for gout such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, insulin resistance and high cholesterol. And obesity increases stress on joints, exacerbating the pain and inflammation that accompanies gout. Another interesting finding related to gout and obesity is that people who were obese in early adulthood developed gout earlier than those who became obese later.
Obesity doesn’t only elevate your risk of developing gout by excess production and retention of uric acid. It also aggravates other risk factors such as high blood pressure and injury to the weight bearing joints. In other words, obesity affects the development of gout in many different ways. In order for you to put a halt on these effects, you need to start losing or maintaining you weight within normal levels by eating healthily and being physically active.