If you have been suffering from gout for years, chances are high that you have been taking allopurinol for some time. Just in case you have never heard of the drug called allopurinol, it is also commonly known as Zyloprim, which is a popular brand of the drug sold in the market. Other brand names are Lopurin and Purinol.
Allopurinol works by lowering the uric acid level and helps prevent gout attacks. It does so by inhibiting the function of xanthine oxidase which is responsible for the breaking down of purine molecules to produce uric acid. Allopurinol is more as a prevention drug which minimize the occurrence of gout attacks for someone who is having hyperuricemia (excess uric acid in blood plasma).
If you are young and just got your first gout attack recently, your doctor will not prescribe allopurinol to you so soon. For newly diagnosed gout patients, usually doctors will first advice young gout patients to watch their diet and drink more water to control the uric acid level in the body. It is only when the uric acid level is constantly beyond range and the frequency of gout attacks increases, then the doctor will prescribe allopurinol to the patient.
You will observe some obvious drop of your blood uric level when you first start on the course of allopurinol. It is a pill that you have to take everyday to minimize the production of uric acid while still watching your diet by keeping away from high protein or high purine meaty food.
For some people, the pill works perfectly fine in preventing any future attacks. But for many people especially chronic gout patients, allopurinol does not seem to have any obvious effect in reducing their chance of getting gout attacks. Instead of lowering down their uric acid level, some patients are suffering from the annoying side effects after taking the drug, the common ones are nausea, diarrhea, and the more serious one is skin rash and severe allergic reactions.
The actual effectiveness of this uric acid reducing drug is seldom discussed publicly nor there is any official study that has been conducted specifically on this question. Just like most of the drugs in the market, majority of the reports about a particular drug are skewed towards how effective it is and only brief mention about the possible side effects.
Instead of looking at reports which is indirectly sponsored by the Big Pharmas, you should go out there and talk to some gout patients that has been taking it and hear the live unbiased comments about this drug. You will be surprised by the answers you hear.
Here is the logic that can give you some idea on the effectiveness of this drug. There are at least 50 billion cells die in the body everyday and the breaking down of DNA in the dead cells will produce plenty of free purines. Some will be reused to produce new cells while some have to be disposed by breaking it down to uric acid and excrete through urine.
Even though you totally abstain for consuming any high purine food, you will still have a lot of purines in the body. Look, purine is not the culprit. God has given us the perfect purine – uric acid regulating mechanism. Do you think a drug that disturbs the cycle will do any good to your body?