Do uric acid crystals stay around forever even after I’ve stopped drinking?
I suspect that I might have gout in my left knee. For the past two months I had been drinking 2 to 3 glasses of red wine daily, and recently I noticed that whenever I have to walk long distances, my knee joint starts to hurt. It’s not red, nor swollen, but when it starts hurting it is warm to the touch and the pain steadily gets worse the more I walk. Whenever that happens, I’d take it easy the next day, and the pain eventually goes away completely in a day or two, but would return again when I walk/run too much again. When I am not walking too much tho my knee feels perfectly fine. Anyway my question is, I have stopped drinking wine for the past two weeks, but I would still get this knee pain when I have walked/ran more than two miles in one single day. I don’t get it. Even if there were any uric acid crystals formed in my knee, I’ve been absolutely alcohol-free for two weeks now, if this IS gout, shouldn’t the crystals have been re-absorbed or otherwise gotten rid of by my body?
I have also been drinking a LOT of water these past two weeks. I used to be a non-drinker, and only started drinking red wine regularly (2-3 glasses/day) two months ago. I am 25 and I don’t eat much red meat, only chicken and occasionally pork. I know gout is the result of long term alcohol abuse, but a little bit of wine over two months? So far only my left knee joint is having this problem. I have never ever injured this knee, so it seems very random that it should start hurting now for no apparent reason. It never had any problems before I started drinking the wine. But the good thing is the pain ONLY starts when I walk/run too much in one day, there is no sudden random pain during the day or night, and my knee joint is not swollen or even red. In fact if you looked at it you wouldn’t have guessed there’s anything wrong with it, other than me limping that is. Like I said, I don’t know if this is indeed gout, but because of it, I can no longer jog more than two miles at a time.
Filed under: Gout Knee
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1. Gout is not necessarily the result of long-term alcohol abuse. As you may have read, gout is a condition of abnormal purine (a component of nucleic acid material) metabolism. This abnormal metabolism leads to build up of uric acid in your blood, and when some uric acid crystals form inside a joint, gout becomes symptomatic.
While red wine can sometimes set it off, gout can affect people who’ve never had a drink in their life. On the other hand, there are many people who drink to the point of dying of alcohol poisoning, without ever having a gout attack.
So the fact your symptoms started when you began to drink red wine a few weeks ago may simply be a coincidence.
2. The most common joint affected by gout is the big toe, not the knee (although the knee is in the top 5). However, the symptoms you described (summarized below) are VERY atypical for gout:
- "the pain ONLY starts when I walk/run too much in one day": gout pain is usually so bad that people cannot even put a blanket over the affected joint, let alone bear weight
- "my knee joint is not swollen or even red": gout usually triggers a severe inflammatory reaction — red, warm, swollen, and painful (constantly)
So, maybe you don’t have gout after all.
Have you considered other possibilities, such as sport injury (which can still occur without an obvious "accident")?