AIBU to think gout at 31 is unusual

[Ohmygoditsgout]

Posting on here for traffic I’m sorry.
I am a 31 year old woman and have symptoms of gout. On Boxing Day I started with really bad pain underneath my right big toe to the side, it was hot, red, swollen and sore. My father in law joked that it looked the same as his gout attacks, I laughed that off. Been to the GP this morning and my lord, she thinks it’s gout!
I am not a drinker, I don’t eat rich food, I am overweight and I won’t lie, I drink a can of coke a day which i have now stopped.
Have any other women on here had gout and it’s turned out not to be an underlying medical condition? Feel quite worried now! Off for my X-ray and waiting for blood tests in 4 weeks, something to do with uric acid levels.

It's not as unusual as you think. My DDad was in his 20's when he first developed it and my DH was in his early 30's. Neither were overweight or had any other major risk factors. Just one of those things.

DH just had meds to manage attacks for the first few years but they got more frequent so now he's on a preventative.

Dad's been on preventatives for 40+ years. A new doctor tried to wean him off them but the attacks came back so he's definitely stuck with them now.

Excess weight can misshape the kidneys so the filters can’t filter out the uric acid effectively. It’s a metabolic disorder with an arthropathy presentation that also increases the risk of type 2 diabetes so I’d lose the weight and see if that resolves it. There’s no spare room in the body so anything that shouldn’t be there presses against the next structure and makes it deformed.

Any joint damage is permanent unfortunately so the big toe can be stiff afterwards, potentially you can treat pain from that with insoles in the shoe to limit the range of motion in the joint, and if that doesn’t work steroid injections but these can damage soft tissues and cause bunions to form.

As someone has said now your body has stored its excess uric crystals in your big toe joint blood levels will be lower temporarily until it’s building for the next episode.

It actually may not be gout. I had something that presented very much like gout. Sudden swollen hot toe joint, literally came on while I was sleeping and then worsened to the point I couldn’t walk by the next day.

I then developed similar pains in my knees. They investigated as rheumatoid arthritis. As time went on, I had muscle aches and severe fatigue.

In the end, it turned out to be a vitamin D deficiency that was presenting like a sort of reactive arthritis. But to start, it looked exactly like gout.