Familial gout and renal failure in young women

Six members of kindred with only one surviving male in three generations, a history of an unusual combination of precocious gout in a girl of nine and rapidly progressive renal disease in young women, have been investigated. Sensitive indicators of the familial defect were the early development of hyperuricemia, an inability to concentrate the urine, and a patchy non-specific interstitial nephritis at biopsy. All these features were disproportionately severe for the young age and sex of affected subjects, and the relatively moderate reduction of GFR in some. Identification of these characteristics enabled the recognition of an early stage of the disease in one young family member whose renal function had previously been normal. The histopathology of the renal lesion in this normotensive teenage girl was similar to that frequently attributed to ageing or hypertension in the archetypal middle-aged gouty male, indicating that neither age nor vascular lesions are necessarily implicated in the latter. Allopurinol has halted further progression of the renal lesion in this young girl over two years. It is thus possible that early diagnosis may benefit the subsequent clinical course and may be important since the number of such families in our experience suggests that precocious familial gout with renal failure is more prevalent than currently recognized.