Caveat: I do not have any qualification in medicine or biology.
Hyperuricemia is a condition where acid uric in your blood is above a certain concentration, this condition, if lasting for long enough, can cause gout, which is something that you certainly do not want.
I have hyperuricemia
As part of my routines checks and for some travel preparations I visited my GP, among the routines check was a blood check that I did on the spot.
The result came indicating a level of 8.7 mg/L of uric acid which is above the upper bracket of the normal range indicated on the document at 7.7 mg/L (which I think is 0.7 mg/L above of the recommended maximal value in the US and 0.5 mg/L above what it was a few years ago here).
Really?
My previous control, two months before, was at this upper bracket. As I like to think I have control on my life, I tend to overlook the non-actionable elements that could explain this situation. However, when reading online the main lifestyle factor for acid uric seems to be purine rich food:
- Red meat
- Seafood
- Food and drinks with high fructose
- Alcohol (including alcohol-free beer)
Food accounts for only 12% of the problem but that’s still where I think I have most leverage.
And I am pretty much a monk when I read that list. Not a perfect monk, but a monk-leaning person. I consume a bit of seafood but rarely, I drank little alcohol in the last month (probably less than 7 units a week), it is true that I drank a bit of alcohol-free beer but that too was a couple of occurrences a week. Red meat, especially last month was a rare thing.
My protein sources are mostly chicken, tofu and whey isolate protein powders.
I ended-up looking up if those last ones (protein powders) had an impact as I indeed was consuming more of them over the last two months. I did not find a reliable source, the messages were conflicting.
Then I remembered a remark from my GP: “sport has an impact on uric acid”, and searching around that idea was interesting. I found a paper from 1980, Purine Metabolism During Strenuous Muscular Exercise in Man (Sutton & al., 1980), and this was getting interesting:
- After a 5 km race, one group saw its mean uric acid increase from 6.9 to 8.5 mg/dL
- After a marathon, another group went from 6.2 to 7.9 mg/dL.
Suddenly, I thought about my agenda :
- Day before the blood sample at 20h to 21h: confined scuba diving training.
- Day of the blood sample 5h30 to 7h: leg workout at the gym.
- Blood sample at 8h45.
Since I am tracking all my food and water intake. I know my exact diner from the night before.
I was suddenly thinking that maybe I created an intense bias in the measurement by working out.
Getting more data points
I decided to reproduce the same situation and gather more data points to see if there is indeed an increase following physical activity. Properly quantifying it will not be possible on a single episode, but that could give me an idea.
- Day -2: rest & 2 350 mL water intake
- Day -1, rest & 1 830 mL water intake
- Day -1, 7:37 before breakfast: 7.9 mg/dL
- Day -1, evening: confined scuba diving training (luckily I still had some in my agenda).
- Day -1, evening: identical diner, including 660 mL alcohol-free beer (not accounted in water intake).
- Day 0, 6:35: 7.8 mg/dL
- Day 0, 6:45 - 8:15: leg training, 600ml water intake
- Day 0, 10:05 before breakfast: 7.8 mg/dL
- Day 0, 15:00: 7.6 mg/dL
- Day +1, 6:44 before breakfast: 6.7 mg/dL
Conclusion: nothing
At this point, I felt kind of frustrated: because the new data was not showing much. The good news is that it seems that the sample that triggered all this was probably not characterizing my general state. The other interesting piece of information is that I did not reproduce the results of the paper mentioned above, either:
- The uric acid spike is very limited in time (they measured uric acid right after exercise, I waited for two hours).
- The nature of the work-out was too different to trigger similar results.
- I was an outlier that week.
- Something wrong with the study.
