What causes gout flares?
One of the features of gout is that pain symptoms come in flare-ups. Patients won’t experience continuous severe pain. Instead, they have very sudden and severe episodes of pain that take hours and sometimes days to clear up. They are known as gout flares, and they are triggered by acute increases in the production of uric acid, which produces crystals very rapidly and triggers sudden pain symptoms.
These changes in urate levels can be triggered by what we eat and what we drink. For instance, overindulgence in high-purine foods and heavy alcohol ingestion can trigger a flare-up. If you become dehydrated, lose weight very rapidly, or go through trauma, you can also experience an outbreak. They are also precipitated by some medications, such as low-dose aspirin, niacin, and some diuretic medications. Some vaccines are also known to trigger a gout flare, especially the recombinant zoster vaccine.