Men with gout are significantly more likely to die of a heart attack than men without gout, researchers reported here at the meeting of the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR).

What’s more, the increased risk cannot be explained by the presence of conventional cardiovascular risk factors.

“We found that the presence of gout increased cardiovascular mortality about 16 years later,” reported Dr. Eswar Krishnan, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

His group conducted a 16-year follow-up analysis of 9105 men between 41 and 63 years old who initially had no evidence of heart disease.

After taking into consideration known risk factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking, obesity, alcohol use, family history of heart attack, use of diuretics and aspirin, and impaired kidney function, men with gout were about 50 percent more likely to die of a heart attack than men without gout.

Krishnan said that the findings suggest that doctors should keep a particularly close eye on their patients with gout to make sure they don’t develop heart disease.

“Our approach to patients with gout should be similar to our approach to diabetics,” he said. “We take extra care to check out diabetic patients for cardiovascular risk. We make sure their eyes are OK and that their cholesterol is OK and that they exercise. The message from our study is that gout should be treated on a par with diabetes.”