Positive association of tomato consumption with serum urate: Support for tomato consumption as an anecdotal trigger of gout flares
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Cadzow, Murray
Dalbeth, Nicola
Jones, Peter B
Stamp, Lisa K
Hindmarsh, Jennie Harre
Todd, Alwyn S
Walker, Robert J
Topless, Ruth
Merriman, Tony R
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Background: Gout is a consequence of an innate immune reaction to monosodium urate crystals deposited in joints. Acute gout attacks can be triggered by dietary factors that are themselves associated with serum urate levels. Tomato consumption is an anecdotal trigger of gout flares. This study aimed to measure the frequency of tomato consumption as a self-reported trigger of gout attacks in a large New Zealand sample set, and to test the hypothesis that tomato consumption is associated with serum urate levels.
Methods: Two thousand fifty one New Zealanders (of Māori, Pacific Island, European or other ancestry) with clinically-ascertained gout were asked about gout trigger foods. European individuals from the Atherosclerosis Risk In Communities (ARIC; n = 7517) Study, Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS; n = 2151) and Framingham Heart Study (FHS; n = 3052) were used to test, in multivariate-adjusted analyses, for association between serum urate and tomato intake.
Results: Seventy one percent of people with gout reported having ≥1 gout trigger food. Of these 20 % specifically mentioned tomatoes, the 4th most commonly reported trigger food. There was association between tomato intake and serum urate levels in the ARIC, CHS and FHS combined cohort (β = 0.66 μmolL−1 increase in serum urate per additional serve per week; P = 0.006) - evident in both sexes (men: β = 0.84 μmolL−1, P = 0.035; women: β = 0.59 μmolL −1, P = 0.041).
Conclusions: While our descriptive and observational data are unable to support the claim that tomato consumption is a trigger of gout attacks, the positive association between tomato consumption and serum urate levels suggests that the self-reporting of tomatoes as a dietary trigger by people with gout has a biological basis.
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BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders
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16
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© Flynn et al. 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Clinical sciences
Clinical sciences not elsewhere classified