With all the focus on cancer of late, which is of course very important, it's nice to see some other research and good clinical results for other chronic conditions, such as Gout. I have watch my mother, who is 84 years old, and who is also a diabetic who has gout, for years, trying to balance her diet.
When you have both of these items going on in your system, the diet and what you can and can't eat becomes a real challenge. Some items that are good for keep down uric acid are not good for the diabetes diet and vice versa, so what you end up with sometimes is a pretty restricted boring diet, as with process of elimination, you have to knock off all the items on the bad side of both lists, not fun.
So if you don't have diabetes or gout, be thankful as you still have the pleasure of many food items that others do not. At any rate I hope this moves along quickly as the report states it is the fist drug to really have an affect on reducing uric acid, and gout is no longer the 'old man's" disease by any means. Pegloticase had some side effects and it appeared that a few hours needed to pass before the drug took effect, but at any rate, this looks very promising, more work with enzymes and personalized medicine. BD
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new drug designed to normalize levels of uric acid in the blood appears to be safe and tolerable and may help patients with the painful arthritic condition known as gout better cope with their disease, say researchers at Duke University Medical Center.
The results of a phase II clinical trial show that the drug, an enzyme called pegloticase, lowered uric acid in blood to target levels within just a few hours in a majority of the participants.
"We were delighted to see this response, because all of the patients in our trial had already tried all the existing treatments for gout, and nothing was helping them," said John Sundy, M.D., a rheumatologist at Duke and the lead author of the study.
During treatment most of the patients continued to have gout flares and a majority developed non-neutralizing antibodies to the drug, which shortened the half-life of the drug in the bloodstreams of some patients.
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