When it comes to various arthritis diseases, everyone often mistakenly believes that this is a problem that only the middle-aged and elderly people will have.
As everyone knows, arthritis has a variety of types in the clinic, and some arthritis is just easy to find young middle-aged people, such as gouty arthritis is one of them, it is a common and very complex arthritis, and its pathogenesis factors are directly related to hyperuricemia.
The so-called hyperuricemia refers to the chronic metabolic disease of imbalance in blood uric acid metabolism, which is one of the most high-incidence metabolic diseases in the mainland.
Although not all hyperuricemia develops gout, it is the basis for the onset of gout. If you have hyperuricemia without active treatment, once uric acid precipitates and accumulates in the joints, it will cause an attack of gout.
In mainland China, gout is clinically divided into four stages, and patients at different stages have different manifestations:
1. Asymptomatic period
From hyperuric acid to gout is not sudden, it tends to go through a long period of time to develop, first the patient will spend a period of asymptomatic period.
That is to say, the patient's blood uric acid level has reached the diagnostic criteria of hyperuricemia, such as the blood uric acid level in men is above 420 μmol/L, and the female is above 360 μmol/L, but the body does not have any symptoms, and only after an accidental physical examination, the existence of the disease is discovered;
2, acute phase
If the diagnosis of hyperuricemia is confirmed, but the patient has not been actively treated, and there are still many bad living and eating habits, such as not controlling weight, long-term alcoholism, eating a lot of purine-containing foods, and so on.
Not only will the level of blood uric acid continue to rise, but uric acid will also precipitate a substance called monosodium urate crystals, which will continue to be deposited in the patient's joints, the more weak the skin cover, the lower the local temperature of the joints, the easier it is to deposit urate crystals, they will promote inflammatory inflammation of the joints, from the asymptomatic stage to the acute gout phase.
As a result, patients may have obvious redness, swelling, hot pain sensations in the joints, and after a period of time or treatment, the pain gradually relieves;
3. Intermittent attacks
The fact that the symptoms of acute gout have been alleviated does not mean that the gout itself is cured, it is only currently asymptomatic. Next, gout will enter the intermittent period from the acute phase, and once the patient drinks heavily again and eats a lot of purine foods, it will cause another attack of gout.
And within a year, the number of patients will be more and more sick, the condition will gradually become more serious, from small joints to large joints, from lower limbs to upper limbs, and even affect the spine, shoulder joints and so on. In mainland China, some patients did not enter the intermittent attack period, but directly developed from the acute stage to the chronic arthritis stage;
4. Tophi
Tophi is clinically divided into subcutaneous and chronic types, usually subcutaneous tophi is mostly found in the auricle, small joints and other areas, the patient's tissue will appear multiple vegetations of different sizes, showing yellow and white. Once ulcerated, a white paste-like substance is also excreted from the affected area. The second type appears on the patient's joints and surrounding tissues.
According to the information currently available, no matter which type of tophi appears, it will cause damage to the patient's joints and bones, and even cause fibrosis of surrounding tissues, joint deformities, dysfunction and other serious problems.
As far as the current medical technology is concerned, the clinical way to completely cure gout, as long as an acute gout attack, the disease may recur in the future, and in the case of poor control, it will also develop towards severity.
Therefore, as long as gout occurs, patients should actively cooperate with doctors for treatment to avoid the irreparable severity of the disease.