As a gout sufferer, you have to watch out for a lot of things that could affect your chronic condition. You cannot eat certain foods such as sardines or liver without risking a painful gout attack. If you have other health issues such as high blood pressure, the medicines you take for that ailment can affect your gout as well. The mineral calcium can even cause a condition that feels like a gout attack but is not the same thing.
Gout
Gout is a genetic form of arthritis that occurs if your kidneys do not properly remove sufficient amounts of uric acid from your body. Uric acid is the end waste product of purines, a substance found in many foods, including sardines, anchovies, liver, duck and some other forms of meat and fish. When you eat these foods, your digestive system turns purines into uric acid. Non-gout-sufferers simply expel the uric acid through urination. If you have gout, however, it means that excess uric acid remains in your body, lodges in your joints and then crystallizes. The crystals build up, cause inflammation and pain during a gout attack.
Hypertension
Hypertension or high blood pressure can actually prevent gout attacks because usually it means you have excess fluid in your body. This helps to keep the uric acid from solidifying into crystals and causing pain. However, hypertension can cause serious or fatal conditions such as heart attacks and strokes. Your doctor typically prescribes anti-hypertensive medicines to lower your blood pressure.
Hypertension Medications
Diuretics or water pills flush out excess water from your body, reducing blood pressure. This can dehydrate you, however, which can cause gout flareups. Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, commonly called ACE inhibitors, such as lisinopril work to relax your blood vessels to reduce your blood pressure. This process also can induce gout attacks, according to the website Drugs.com. Lisinopril can produce sweating and a decrease in urination, according to the Mayo Clinic website, which may decrease the amount of fluid in your body. This can allow the uric acid to crystallize and cause an attack.
Pseudogout
Calcium can produce a condition known as pseudogout or calcium pyrophosphate deposition disease. If you have too much calcium in your system, it can crystallize in your joints the same way uric acid does if you have gout. Although pseudogout typically happens in your knees, not in your feet as gout does, it produces the same type of pain, tenderness and redness as gout.
Gout and Pseudogout Medications
Although the crystallization of gout and pseudogout occur for different reasons because of different imbalances, your doctor may treat you with some of the same medications for both, according to the Mayo Clinic website. For example, you may take colchicine for gout, usually in a very low dose every day to control the condition and in larger doses during attacks. Your doctor may prescribe it for pseudogout if you have problems using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. or NSAIDs. NSAIDs--both over-the-counter types such as ibuprofen and naproxen, and prescription level types such as indomethacin--can help reduce the inflammation of gout and pseudogout, which in turn reduces the pain.
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