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Hundredfold increase in hospitalizations among gout patients underscores disease burden
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CHICAGO — All-cause hospitalization increased 410% among patients with gout during the last 22 years, nearly 100 times more than the overall population in the United States, according to findings presented during the ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting.
“Gout has generally been considered a disease that affects the joints, but it has been increasingly recognized that gout in general, and hyperuricemia specifically, can also cause systemic manifestations all over the body” Gurkirpal Singh, MD, adjunct clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University, told Healio Rheumatology.
In their study, Singh and colleagues found that all-cause hospitalizations in the overall U.S. population increased from 33.7 million in 1993 to 35.4 million in 2014 — a 4.8% increase; however, among patients with gout, all-cause hospitalizations increased from 167,441 in 1993 to 854,475 in 2014.
“From a scientific perspective, this means that our estimates from 10 years ago on gout comorbidities are basically all underestimated – they are all wrong – because we didn’t have as good data capture systems as we do now,” Singh told Healio Rheumatology. “It also means that when one sees a patient with gout or hyperuricemia, they have to think beyond the joint, that there is something else going on within the body that is causing systemic inflammation.”