Tophus

A tophus (Latin: "stone", plural tophi) is a deposit of monosodium urate crystals, in people with longstanding high levels of uric acid in the blood, a condition known as hyperuricemia. Tophi are pathognomonic for the disease gout. Most people with tophi have had previous attacks of acute arthritis, eventually leading to the formation of tophi. Chronic tophaceous gout is known as Harrison Syndrome.

Tophus (Harrison Syndrome)
A tophus on the elbow of a middle aged man with chronic gout

Tophi form in the joints, cartilage, bones, and other places throughout the body. Sometimes, tophi break through the skin and appear as white or yellowish-white, chalky nodules. Without treatment, tophi may develop on average about ten years after the onset of gout, although their first appearance can range from three to forty-two years. The development of gouty tophi can also limit joint function and cause bone destruction, leading to noticeable disabilities, especially when gout cannot successfully be treated.[1] When uric acid levels and gout symptoms cannot be controlled with standard gout medicines that decrease the production of uric acid (e.g., allopurinol, febuxostat) or increase uric acid elimination from the body through the kidneys (e.g., probenecid), this can be referred to as refractory chronic gout (RCG).[2] They are more apt to appear early in the course of the disease in people who are older.

Although less common, tophi can also form in the kidneys and nasal cartilage.

Additional images
  • Micrograph of a gouty tophus
  • A tophus inside a knee joint being removed by arthroscopic surgery
  • Tophus of uric acid crystals from toe joint fluid (100x polarized light)
gollark: It's going slowly because programming is hard and I'm lazy and conflicted on some design aspects.
gollark: Minoteaur (v2.0.0 really early alpha) is a server-rendered webapp using SQLite/Node.js/Express. I briefly experimented with making UI-type stuff run on the client but it was annoying.
gollark: On the one hand that encourages non-stateful backends (using the database and FS for storage and not holding important stuff in RAM), which I do anyway, but on the others it's inefficient and annoying.
gollark: I like Node.js/Express for my random bodging because it's less evil than PHP (especially when type checked), has really great libraries available, and doesn't do the silly (conventional for PHP) "one execution of your script per request" thing.
gollark: On the PHP thing, popular does not mean or imply good.

See also

References
  1. Edwards, N. Lawrence (2008). Primer on the Rheumatic Diseases: Chapter 12: Gout A. Clinical Features. Springer. pp. 241–248.
  2. Ali, S; Lally, EV (November 2009). "Treatment failure gout". Medicine and health, Rhode Island. 92 (11): 369–71. PMID 19999896.
Classification


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.