Gout-med risk findings even worse than anticipated

Having gout is like walking a tightrope… over the Grand Canyon!

It’s one of the most excruciating pains you can have, but the drugs dispensed to treat it are some of the most dangerous ones you can take.

What a choice!

Now, the latest warning to hit the fan is about Uloric (which also goes by the generic name of febuxostat).

During a meeting of the American College of Cardiology last week, it was announced that patients taking Uloric have a significantly higher risk of dying than those taking another extremely risky gout med.

It’s enough for anyone suffering from this “disease of kings” to want to toss all of the prescription drugs used to treat it in the trash.

Actually, that’s not such a bad idea, considering the fact that there are natural remedies for gout that have been proven time and time again to reduce uric acid and stop agonizing joint pain in its tracks.

No Rx required!

An ‘all cause’ proposition

Last December, I told you about the storm brewing over Uloric.

It was approved in 2009 under a cloud of suspicion that it was causing heart attacks, strokes, and other “heart-related” deaths when compared to another extremely dangerous gout med called allopurinol.

So, the FDA told its maker, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, that it would approve its new gout drug under one condition: A nine-year safety study would have to be conducted to further investigate that risk.

Yikes! Can you imagine how a patient would feel if they knew that an FDA-approved drug was the subject of an (almost) decade-long study to find out exactly how dangerous it might be?

Shouldn’t those questions be answered before a drug is approved?

Nevertheless, the trial, dubbed CARES, finished up last year, almost two years short of what the FDA asked for.

When the preliminary results were released (which I alerted you to in December), even the FDA felt obliged to warn consumers, and the agency issued a “safety communication” about the heart-risk findings.

And it gets worse.

Now that the study results have been tallied, it turns out that the increased chance of dying from taking Uloric isn’t just heart related. It’s an “all-cause” proposition.

But if you’re expecting your doc to ring you up with a warning, that doesn’t sound likely.

When a reporter asked experts at the big cardiology get-together if these findings would “rattle clinicians,” she was told that if a patient has been on Uloric for years, they’ll probably continue to get it – just “like anything else.”

And that should give you an idea of how casual doctors, drugmakers, and regulators are when it comes to your life!

As far as allopurinol — that other popular gout med — goes, we warned you over two years ago how a multinational study found it to be commonly associated with a horrific side effect called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, something that can literally cause your skin to peel off of your body as if you were being boiled alive.

And you can bet that clinicians weren’t rattled by those findings, either!

But honestly, there’s no reason in the world to take such risks when potent and proven natural remedies are easily available to treat gout.

• Cherries and cherry juice is the No. 1 way to lower uric acid levels and reduce your risk of a painful gout attack. One study from Boston University Medical Center found that eating 10 cherries a day could cut gout flares in half. Other research concluded that the same is true for taking a tablespoon of tart cherry extract twice a day. And you can also find cherry extracts in supplement form.
• Apple cider vinegar is another way to curb uric acid buildup. Simply add one or two tablespoons to a glass of water that you sip periodically during the day.
• Vitamin C can also lower uric acid levels when taken at around 1,500 mg daily.

Another way to keep a gout flare-up at bay is to substantially reduce the amount of fructose you’re consuming. That means that you’ll need to carefully read labels and avoid HFCS, agave syrup, crystalline fructose, and even sugar.

“Gout drug febuxostat linked to more CV deaths without uptick in CV events: CARES trial” Caitlin E. Cox, March 14, 2018, tctMD, tctmd.com