What are the symptoms of gout?

With the improvement of living standards, people's diets are becoming more and more distinctive. Many people like to eat seafood and drink beer, but they don't know that this will cause diseases. Gout is caused by such situations. But it is not absolute, because people's body systems are different. Some people may still be allergic to seafood, causing dizziness and nausea. However, gout is a serious condition, especially for those who like to drink beer. What are the symptoms of gout? Let’s take a closer look today.

Most patients have no obvious signs before an attack, or only experience fatigue, general malaise, and joint pain. A typical attack often begins with awakening the patient in the middle of the night due to joint pain. The pain progressively intensifies, reaching a peak in about 12 hours, and feels like tearing, cutting, or biting, which is unbearable. The affected joints and surrounding tissues are red, swollen, hot, painful, and have limited function. Usually resolves spontaneously within a few days or 2 weeks. The first attack often affects a single joint, some of which occur at the first metatarsophalangeal joint. Later in the course of the disease, some patients also have involvement of this area. The next most common joints are the dorsum of the foot, heel, ankle, knee, wrist and elbow. The shoulder, hip, spine and temporomandibular joints are less frequently affected. Multiple joints may be affected at the same time, manifesting as polyarthritis.

Gout attacks can last for several days to several weeks and then resolve on their own, usually with no obvious sequelae, or leaving local skin pigmentation, desquamation, and itching. They then enter an asymptomatic interval period and relapse after several months, years, or more than ten years. Most patients relapse within one year, and the episodes become more and more frequent, affecting more and more joints, and the symptoms lasting longer and longer. The affected joints generally develop from the lower limbs to the upper limbs, from the distal small joints to the large joints, and the joints such as the fingers, wrists and elbows may be affected.

Subcutaneous tophi and chronic tophi-induced arthritis are the result of long-term significant hyperuricemia, with large amounts of monosodium urate crystals deposited in the subcutaneous tissue, synovium, cartilage, bone, and periarticular soft tissue. The typical site for subcutaneous tophi to occur is the auricle, but it is also common around joints with recurrent attacks and in areas such as the olecranon, Achilles tendon, and patellar bursa. The appearance is yellow-white growths of varying sizes raised under the skin. The skin surface is thin, and white powdery or pasty substances are discharged after rupture, which does not heal for a long time. Subcutaneous tophi often coexist with chronic tophi arthritis.

After understanding the symptoms of gout, we know that we should be careful not to eat seafood too often, and we should not eat beef and mutton. However, to prevent gout we need to change our lifestyle habits. It is best to pay attention to our eating habits and not often eat foods that are likely to cause gout. Gout is a disease that is very painful and many people find it unbearable.