What Happens When Gout is Left Untreated?

When gout is not treated properly serious complications can arise, many of which extend beyond joint pain and can affect your overall quality of life. Here’s how the build up of uric acid in your body can affect not only your joints but your kidneys, eyes, heart, and other organs and systems.

When uric acid builds up, it travels through your blood to your kidneys. If uric acid crystals form in the kidneys, painful kidney stones can develop and create blockages that prevent the kidneys from doing their job of removing waste — leading to infection. Kidney stones caused by uric acid crystals can also scar the kidneys due to their sharp edges. These complications can lead to chronic kidney disease and eventually kidney failure.

The buildup of uric acid crystals induces inflammation in your body that has a domino effect on heart health with its link to high blood pressure. Left unchecked, you can be at increased risk of heart attack, heart failure, or stroke.

When gout flares, your white blood cells attack the uric acid crystals that form on the linings of your joints and can get damaged in the process. The chemicals they release cause pain, swelling, and more inflammation. Left untreated, repeated gout attacks can permanently damage your joints and inhibit your mobility.

When untreated gout turns into advanced, chronic gout, uric acid crystals can cause hard nodules called tophi that form under the skin, on the surface of joints, or on cartilage. Typically, tophi develop on the hands, feet, elbows, and along the back of the ankles. Fortunately, they are painless, but when left untreated they can cause joints to deteriorate.

Although eye complications related to gout are uncommon, long-term gout can cause uric acid to build in eye tissue and has been linked to cataracts and dry eye. Cataracts are a clouding of the lens in your eye, which is normally clear. When cataracts develop, vision becomes foggy. Dry eye is diagnosed when your eyes stop making enough tears or don’t produce good quality tears, and your eyes become red and irritated.

Another rare complication of gout is poor lung function when uric acid crystals build up in the lungs. When this happens, you may have trouble breathing, which can lead to low levels of oxygen in the blood and labored breathing.

Because gout attacks typically happen at night, recurrent attacks can wake you while you are sleeping. This constant awakening also disrupts rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is important for physical and emotional health.Once you are awake, the intense pain that follows can keep you from falling back to sleep, leading to sleep deprivation.

The chronic pain associated with repeated gout attacks can lead to low self-esteem, stress, anxiety, and isolation. In turn, depression can then intensify the pain caused by gout, thereby creating a vicious cycle. In fact, people with long-term gout have a high risk of depression.

Having a high uric acid level, as gout patients do, can be an early indication for cancers that develop in skin tissues and the linings of internal organs. Studies show that gout is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer in men. Liver, lung, and colon cancers have also commonly been detected in people with gout.