Scientists: Don't 'Go Out and Get Gout,' but It May Protect Against Alzheimer's

​Once gout was a disease for kings, yet like so many things that kings used to enjoy exclusive rights to—plumbing, divorces—today it is spread more evenly throughout the world, from Amer​ica to Europe to southeast Asia to urban subsaharan Africa. Turns out, despite its reputation, gout is more accurately described as a really painful type of arthritis, which is to say there's nothing particularly regal about it.

Never ones to miss an opportunity, no matter how odd, however, a team of researchers in Boston noticed something interesting about gout sufferers—they tend to get Alzheimer's disease less often than people without gout.

A new study published in the Annals of Rheum​atic Diseases states that they found that there was a "24 percent lower risk of Alzheimer's disease amongst people with a history of gout, after taking into account age, sex, BMI, socio-economic status, lifestyle factors, prior heart conditions and use of heart drugs."

When your body breaks down chemicals called purines, which are found in foods like liver, anchovies, mackerel, or beer, it produces uric acid. Normally your kidneys filter uric acid from your blood, and it is sent out in your urine.

Gout is caused by too much uric acid in​ the bloodstream, because either your body is producing too much or your kidneys aren't filtering enough out. Deposits of uric acid can form needle-like crystals that lead to pain and inflammation in joints: gout. This is all bad stuff.

However, uric acid has also been shown to have "neuroprotective effects," against certain types of neuron death and protections have also been observed "in animal models of other neurological conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury," the study states.

Relying on data from a British computerized medical record database that collects information from general practices, the researchers compared 59,224 patients who had gout with 238,805 "matched non-gout individuals. The mean age at baseline was 65 years and approximately 71 percent of the population was men," because me​n get gout three or four times more often than women.

"Our findings provide the first population-based evidence for the potential protective effect of gout on the risk of Alzheimer's disease and support the purported neuroprotective role of uric acid," the study's authors wrote. "If confirmed by future studies, a therapeutic investigation that has been employed to prevent progression of Parkinson's Disease may be warranted for this relatively common and devastating condition."

Now the scientists didn't advise anyone to "go out and get gout," although that does rhyme and sounds like it would involve a lot of overeating and drinking. Apparently your body can also produce too much uric acid if you exercise excessively, so you can guess which one some doctor is going to recommend. So let's all hope that uric acid's benefits can find their way into a supplement or something.