A Medscape report provides details on a study that determined sleep apnea was independently associated with incident cases of articular gout.
Using a large data set from the United Kingdom, Zhang and colleagues found that sleep apnea was independently associated with incident cases of articular gout. They found this association after identifying 270 cases of incident gout among a group of 9865 individuals with newly diagnosed sleep apnea and 43,598 matched individuals without sleep apnea. Specifically, the raw rate of incident gout in individuals with sleep apnea was 8.4 cases per 1000 person-years compared with 4.8 cases per 1000 person-years in individuals without sleep apnea.
In addition, the investigators adjusted the analyses for other risk factors that may be related to gout and sleep apnea, including age, gender, body mass index, alcohol intake, and hypertension. In these adjusted analyses, the rate of incident gout was still significantly higher among individuals with sleep apnea compared with individuals without sleep apnea.
The news reports about this study incorrectly assert that the control group comprised individuals without sleep apnea. In the paper, the control group comprised individuals who had never been diagnosed with sleep apnea. Because sleep apnea is so grossly underdiagnosed, many individuals in the control group probably did have sleep apnea, and many or even all of the gout sufferors in the control group may indeed have had sleep apnea. The likelihood of incident gout occurring in those with sleep apnea vs. those without sleep apnea may be much higher than 8.4/4.8 .