About a urate test
I think if a Urate in urine test is feasible it might be very helpful. For a litmus-type test I guess you would have to find a compound that reacts with urate and turns color when it does. Also it would need to turn different shades of that color depending on the urate level. I would think something like the glucometer that diabetics use to test glucose in the blood, that gives a more accurate number reading of the level, would be more ideal. (Are you familiar with glucometers and how they work? Diabetics can check 4 or more times a day with relative ease and not too much expense. The glucometers get smaller, quicker, need less blood all the time.)And urine is much easier to get than blood! Actually a uric acid in the blood test could probably be devised
Malia Berthelette on April 26th, 2007
I am usually not one to put on the pessimistic hat, so I’m gonna turn my black hat into a green one for a moment. I was thinking “sure . . . a drug company develop a device to help ward off gout attacks? not likely if there isn’t something in it for them.”
So what is in it for them? I’m thinking several things might be possibilities:
- for the makers of allopurinol, better saftey through feedback on dosage effectiveness (helpful for avoiding those nasty class action suits later on in the drug’s life)
- for other companies, glucose meters are often almost given away, to ensure that the client has to use your expensive test strips.
- for existing glucose meter manufacturers, a new profitable way to leverage their existing technologies. Since gout is another disease associated with obesity, it is likely a growing market too!
However, before these things can happen, someone has to make an important breakthough. We have to figure out the appropriate measure for when a gout attack is coming on or how severe the attack is going to be. We may only be measuring a symptom of the disease, just like with diabetes, but if you can detect the right symptom, you get new data to help identify the next step in the research. So are there any researchers out there doing gout?
Jadwiga Kunau on April 28th, 2007
I think your right. I was talking to my doctor and he said that drug companies don’t want to invest in gout research. He said there is no money to be made so they focus their attention elsewhere. According to him less than 200,000 gout sufferers are on medication. 200,000 may seem like allot to us but not to big pharmaceutical companies. Viagra hit 1billion dollars in sales its first year and I believe these are the type of numbers drug companies want to see.
Sabina Shamel on April 29th, 2007
I spoke to Dr. Enzenauer as well as Professor Cal Meyers fromSouthern Illinois University, an Organic Chemistry Researcher for 40years and, yes, there are already ways to measure urate and yes, wecould probably figure out how to make a home urine test.
However, there are s few problems with such a test. First, Dr.Enzenauer says that although you know what the urate level is and youknow the history of that level in a specific patient, you have nodata about what the level should be, what it should drift to and whyit is going where it is.
Moreover, he also lamants that there are many people with uremicpoisoning in their system, i.e. their kidneys simply do not work, andeven though they get terribly high levels of urate in their blood,they do not develop gout.
The real problem is that the level you measure in the urine willdepend, very heavily, on how much water the person has had to drinkand when, during his daily cycle, you make the measurement. Therealready is a urate test that is done with a 24 hour sample of urine,ugh, and I’m going to request that I be given the test. Someone onhere posted that they had just completed the 24 hour test and I aminterested in what was found.
I have suggested that a needle biopsy test for urate dissolved in thefatty tissue of your system could be developed and this conceptcaught Dr. Enzenauer’s as well as another rhumatologist’s attentionwhen I mentioned it to them. As we have discussed on here, when youare over weight your uric acid will dissolve in the fatty tissue inyour body and stay there. When you finally try to lose weight, thebody can metabolize the fat but when it is burned, so to speak, thereis all the uric acid left behind and that is probably what causes usour problem.
What we do not know, however, (and we should know) is whether a nongout sufferer who is over weight has the same amount of uric aciddissolved in their fatty tissue as us gout sufferers. That is notsomething that is known and it shouild be. Well it sould be if therewere a test for uric acid in fat tissue. There doesn’t seem to be oneand it seems like no one has thought of it yet. It isn’t a hard thingto determine and I would like to know mine but the test has to bedeveloped. I have contacted Dr. Meyers at SIU and he has agreed tohelp me explore how this measurement might be made.
Thus, I am suggesting that the most important thing to understandfirst is: 1)What is the total uric acid load is on our system? and 2)How does that load compare to people who are at the same amount ofover weight as we are but who are not gout sufferers. We need data.
Knowing what rocK to look under is more than half the battle.