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Spirits and red wine found to have opposite effects on men and women’s risk of gout – study
Is there an association between drinking alcohol and getting gout? Yes, according to new research out of China, but not uniformly across men and women, nor across different beverages. Gout is a type of arthritis that often starts in the big toe, and researchers have been investigating which alcoholic drinks cause flare-ups most among men and women.
Knuckle crackers fear not. Your habit does not appear to have any association with the onset of arthritis although it may irritate the people around you. Meanwhile, those with arthritis have been given cause for preemptive celebration this year following a flurry of clinical trials into neural implants that should one day be able to treat arthritis and several other long-term, debilitating ailments.
Specific alcoholic drinks can have a greater or lesser effect on men’s and womens gout
The association between alcohol consumption and the risk of developing gout is sex-specific. Thats the overarching takeaway of a piece of research conducted by a group of Chinese scholars, published on August 28, 2024, in Jama Network Open.
They analyzed data from nearly 180,000 men and more than 221,000 women in order to find out if certain drinks affect men more than women and vice versa.�
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Somewhere between two and four times as many men get gout than women, in Europe and North America. The ratio in Asia is closer to 8:1. Therefore, its important to understand how different lifestyle choices in this case, choice of alcoholic beverage affect its onset and development among men and women.
In general terms, they found that drinking red wine, champagne and white wine, beer (including bitter, lager, stout, ale, and Guinness), cider, and spirits are all associated with a higher risk of gout. However, there were some curious differences between the risk elevation among men and women for the various beverages.
Which drinks to avoid if you want to avoid elevating your risk of gout flare-ups
Researchers found that both sexes put themselves at greater risk of gout flare-ups when they drank champagne or white wine, beer or cider, and spirits. Note the absence of red wine from that list, and fortified wine too.
The association between drinking spirits and gout was higher among women than among men. In other words, drinks like vodka, whisky, and gin seem to have a negative effect on women (with gout) than they do on men.
However, the reverse was true for red wine. Men who drank red wine during the study period had a modestly higher risk of gout than those who didnt. Not so for women. Women saw no increase in gout risk when they drank red wine.
And neither men nor women saw any increase when they drank fortified wine. There are many different styles of fortified wine. Popular examples include port, sherry, vermouth, and Madeira.�The original reason for fortifying wine was to preserve it. Most fortified wines are regular wines to which a distilled spirit, often brandy, has been added.
So, bad news if you’re a man with gout, assuming your preferred tipple is red wine. Ditto if you’re a woman who likes spirits. If you can train your taste buds to like something else, more fool the gout. If you can forgo the booze altogether, you’ll probably find yourself in better shape.
- MORE ON ARTHRITIS: Why you shouldn’t sit with your legs crossed, according to a chiropractor
