Higher Cardiovascular Health Reduced Risk of Gout

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Higher Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) score was associated with lower risk and lower all-cause mortality of hyperuricemia (HUA) and gout in a recent study, which also suggested that optimizing cardiovascular health (CVH) may help reduce the socioeconomic burden of hyperuricemia and gout.¹

“Earlier studies have shown the close association between uric acid and cardiovascular disease (CVD), and HUA & gout share several risks factors with CVD. However, to our knowledge, no study has evaluated the associations between the newly launched LE8 and HUA & gout all over the world. Therefore, using the latest available National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) data, we sought to examine the correlation between AHA’s developed LE8 and the prevalence of HUA or gout in a nationally representative population of US adults. Additionally, we aimed to explore the relationship between LE8 and all-cause mortality among patients with HUA or gout,” lead investigator Yingdong Han, State Key Laboratory of Complex Severe and Rare Diseases, Department of Family Medicine & Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, No. 1 Shuaifuyuan, Beijing, China, and colleagues wrote.¹

The LE8 is the American Heart Association’s most recent assessment for quantification of CVH, which updated the previous Life’s Simple-7 assessment’s metrics and added sleep health as the eighth metric for measuring CVH. The update could show the thresholds for the beneficial associations between LE8 and various diseases.²

Han and colleagues analyzed data from participants in NHANES between 2007 and 2016. They characterized participants into low, moderate, and high CVH groups according to AHA definitions. They explored associations between CVH and hyperuricemia using multivariable logistic regression and cox regression analyses, restricted cubic spline models, subgroup analysis and sensitivity analysis.

The investigators included 23,619 adult participants, 4,775 with hyperuricemia and 1,055 with gout. They found that the overall median LE8 score was 65.62 (interquartile range [IQR], 21.25), the prevalence of hyperuricemia was 20.2%, and the prevalence of gout was 4.5%.¹

After fully adjusting for potential confounders, participants in the high CVH group had an odds ratio (OR) of 0.50 (95% CI, 0.39-0.63) for HUA and participants in the moderate CVH group had an OR of 0.77 (95% CI, 0.67-0.89) compared to the low CVH group. For gout, the high CVH group had an OR of 0.50 (95% CI, 0.30–0.82) and the moderate CVH group had an OR of 0.64 (95% CI, 0.52-0.81) compared with the low CVH group.¹

“In our study, higher LE8 score was strongly associated with lower prevalence of HUA and gout. We also found an inverse correlation between LE8 and all-cause mortality among patients with HUA or gout. The strength of the association among LE8 scores and HUA and gout differed within the study population. Our study results indicate a potential beneficial role of LE8 to reduce the disease burden of HUA and gout. Further longitudinal cohort research on the causality association of LE8 and prevalence of HUA and gout is needed,” Han and colleagues concluded.¹

REFERENCES
1. Han Y, Di H, Wang Y, et al. Exploration of the association between new “Life’s Essential 8” with hyperuricemia and gout among US adults. Qual Life Res (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-024-03777-y

2. Lloyd-Jones, D. M., Allen, N. B., Anderson, C. A. M., et al. (2022). Life’s essential 8: updating and enhancing the american heart association’s construct of cardiovascular health: A presidential advisory from the American Heart Association. Circulation, 146(5), e18–e43. doi: 10.1161/CIR.0000000000001078[publishedOnlineFirst:2022/06/30]