Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine
Gout gene
Gout is an inflammatory disease that results from the deposition of uric acid crystals in the joints. It tends to be somewhat common in people with high levels of uric acid in the blood, which is, in turn, often the result of reduced renal excretion of the acid. How does this chain of events come about? Two papers in Nature Genetics give us a clue: Veronique Vitart and her colleagues and Angela Doring and her colleagues independently identified variants in the gene SLC2A9 that are linked to variability in uric acid concentrations.
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