High uric acid in urine: High uric acid levels in your urine can herald the onset of a gout attack. But uric acid in your blood also needs to be measured. Learn why here.
High Uric Acid in Your Urine
High uric acid in urine can be a sign of impending gout, but it really needs to be considered along with your blood uric acid levels. To understand why, let’s revisit what actually causes your gout…
The agonizing gout, that brings your life to a standstill at times, is caused by uric acid crystals forming in your joints and connective tissue. And uric acid is actually produced during the metabolizing processes that occur in your body.
Now one of your kidneys’ jobs is to process the acid produced and expel excess from your body via your urine (with a little through stools). The relatively low level retained in your blood has some benefits, such as maintaining and repairing the linings of your blood vessels.
Here’s the problem though; sometimes your body just makes far too much uric acid for your kidneys to deal with or your kidneys can sometimes fail to work efficiently enough to handle normal uric acid production.
When this occurs higher-than-normal uric acid levels are present in your blood. This is a condition called hyperuricemia. And under this condition uric acid crystals can form, thus causing your excruciating gout symptoms.
Now, supposing you were suffering from this condition and your doctor were to test both your blood and urine, one of the following results would ensue:-
High Uric Acid in Both Blood and Urine
This tells us that it’s likely that your body is producing too much uric acid for your kidneys to handle, although your kidneys seem to be processing uric acid efficiently enough.
Excess acid will continue to build-up in the blood.
High Blood Uric Acid with Low Urine Uric Acid
This could indicate that your kidneys aren’t working efficiently and not processing uric acid quickly enough, even although your body might be producing normal amounts of uric acid.
So uric acid will build-up in the blood here too.
In both cases, crystal formation is highly likely and, of course, gout.
So, in order to keep on top of this, it may be a good idea to regularly test your blood and urine for uric acid. Talk to your doctor / primary healthcare provider. Or, you can get easy-to-use, very reasonably priced, test kits online (e.g. Amazon) that will do this for you.
