MedPage Today (11/22, Johnson) reported that according to research presented at the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, patients with gout may “face a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) compared with people without gout.” Researchers arrived at that conclusion after using “data from The Health Improvement Network (THIN), an electronic medical records database representative of the UK general population,” to identify “59,224 individuals with gout (70.8% male, mean age 65.3 years) and matched them to 238,805 controls without gout (71.1% male, mean age 65.3 years) based on age, sex, body mass index, date of study entry, and year of enrollment.” After adjustment for confounding factors, “the multivariate hazard ratio of AD among those with gout was 0.76 (95% CI 0.66 to 0.87), translating to a 24% lower risk of AD among people with a history of gout compared to those without.”
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— “Gout May Protect Against Alzheimer’s Disease,” Kate Johnson, MedPage Today, November 21, 2014.