Uric Acid and the Heart

PLoS Medicine: Uric Acid and the Heart
Wheeler JG, Juzwishin KDM, Eiriksdottir G, Gudnason V, Danesh J (2005) Serum uric acid and coronary heart disease in 9,458 incident cases and 155,084 controls: Prospective study and meta-analysis.
What is the level of medical evidence that should be used to inform medical practice? At the bottom of the hierarchy of evidence are anecdotes, expert opinion, case reports, and case series, and at the top is the systematic review of published (and sometimes unpublished) evidence. By necessity, systematic reviews come many years after hypotheses are first raised, and in the interim recommendations for practice may sway back and forth. One example of this is the debate over the role of uric acid in heart disease, which has been going on for more than 50 years. It started with a paper published in 1951 in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found higher serum uric acid concentrations in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) compared with controls. Since then, measurement of serum uric acid has been suggested as a predictor of CHD. But many of the studies on serum uric acid are epidemiologic studies—somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy of evidence—and have come to different conclusions about how useful measurement of uric acid is.