Gout is the most common cause of inflamed joints, and affects about 1.4% of people in the UK. People get gout because they have too much of a substance called uric acid in their blood. We all have uric acid in our blood, it’s just that people with gout have more uric acid than other people and what happens is that, as uric acid levels rise and saturate body tissues with uric acid, then little crystals, tiny crystals of uric acid, form in and around joints which leads to symptoms of gout.

And what about other people who you told when you found out you’d got gout, what were their reactions like?

They all think it’s this rich man’s kind of thing. So it was all, you know, they jumped to the same conclusion like, “Oh, you’ve been drinking the red wine or port or, you know, whatever that is.” And that’s everyones assumption of it. I didn’t actually know until looking into it it’s a – and I think this is right, that it’s a form of arthritis. Yeah. Which, which amazed me. I didn’t – I didn’t know that at all.

Anyone can get gout – it’s one of the commonest reasons for inflamed joints. About one in 100 people in the UK have gout. We know gout affects more men than women, and it’s unusual in women before they have their menopause. People with gout often have other health conditions, like being overweight, or having kidney disease or diabetes. But people often think that gout is self-inflicted and caused by eating the wrong types of food or drinking too much alcohol, whereas in fact for most people, their gout is caused by a combination of their genetic makeup, or their other health conditions, or the tablets they take.

Well we don’t know for sure why gout most commonly affects the big toe, although there are a number of theories. So the first possible explanation is that the foot is cooler than other parts of the body, and crystals of uric acid find it more easy to form at lower temperatures.

The second theory relates to the fact that people quite commonly stub their toe or knock their foot, and that this can commonly lead to an attack of gout.

The third possible explanation relates to other types of arthritis, and the big toe is a joint that is very commonly affected by osteoarthritis, and it’s thought that uric acid crystals form more easily inside joints where the cartilage is affected by arthritis. In truth, we don’t know which of these reasons is the cause, and it’s possible that all three reasons are playing together to explain why gout commonly affects the big toe.