(Press-News.org) A new paper in Rheumatology Advances in Practice, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that Tik Tok videos about gout are commonly misleading, inconsistent, or inaccurate.
Gout is a painful inflammatory arthritis caused by high urate in the blood that crystallizes and deposits in the joints. An estimated forty-one million people worldwide suffer from gout, with physicians diagnosing about seven million new cases a year. There are persistent gaps in awareness and understanding about gout among patients and the public. Although rheumatology guidelines recommend long-term urate-lowering therapy for effective gout management, gout remains poorly controlled among patients.
Some 98% of people aged 12 years or older use social media, and those with health conditions (52%) are more likely to share health information on the platforms. TikTok, with 1.2 billion users, is particularly influential in shaping public beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors. A recent survey of 1,172 women between the ages of 18 and 29 years found that about 70% intentionally sought health information on TikTok, while 92% came across it unintentionally.
Researchers here searched the term “gout” on the TikTok discover page and collected the first two hundred videos, found on December 5, 2024. The investigation revealed that people with gout or close family members were the most prevalent video presenters (27%), followed by health professionals (24%), and members of the public (23%). The main purpose of videos was to provide health advice (38%), share personal gout stories (20%), and sell products (19%).
Approximately 45% of videos mentioned risk factors for gout, with diet and lifestyle being the most common (90%). About 79% of TikTok videos addressed gout management in their content, with a focus on dietary advice. Some videos reported foods to avoid, such as one featuring a patient hospitalized for gout who said that viewers “can reduce your incidences of gout if you cut back on your salt, your alcohol, and your red meat.” Supplements, herbal or home remedies were also commonly referenced types of gout management, with videos promoting products such as “pills made from pure herbs, with no hormones and no side effects.”
Only seven of the TikTok videos discussed medications as a gout management approach, primarily recommending pain relief options such as steroids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like colchicine, ibuprofen, and naproxen. The researchers found that only two TikTok videos mentioned long-term urate-lowering therapy for effective gout management, even though this is the standard, clinically verified treatment for gout recommended by rheumatologists.
In general, the investigators found that the TikToks studied lacked accurate information about urate production and gout-related risk factors, potentially leading to misconceptions about gout. Discussions of risk factors in videos also regularly depicted it as a disease primarily resulting from dietary factors that influenced urate levels. While diet and alcohol are risk factors for the disease, genetics, kidney impairment, and weight play a significantly greater role. Content focused solely on lifestyle and dietary risk factors portrayed gout as a personal choice, rather than caused by underlying factors.
The researchers emphasize that videos here related to gout management primarily platformed advice and treatments not aligned with clinically recommended, evidence-based approaches. Seventy-nine percent of videos in this study mentioned gout management, but dietary advice was the most common (53%), which has limited long-term effectiveness. Herbal remedies and supplements were also widespread gout management strategies presented here, with videos selling products and using imagery of health professionals in their content.
"TikTok has great potential as a tool to raise awareness around health issues such as gout and promote information that aligns with clinical guidelines," said the paper's lead author, Samuela ‘Ofanoa. "In an increasingly digital world, there is a need for more health professionals and organisations to seize the opportunity that social media platforms present, and create content that can counter misinformation and improve understanding about gout in our communities."
The paper, “Gout, TikTok and misleading information: A content analysis,” is available (at midnight on December 10th) at https://academic.oup.com/rheumap/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/rap/rkaf126.
Direct correspondence to:
Samuela ‘Ofanoa
Pacific Health Section, University of Auckland
28 Park Avenue, Grafton
Auckland, 1023 NEW ZEALAND
s.ofanoa@auckland.ac.nz
To request a copy of the study, please contact:
Daniel Luzer
daniel.luzer@oup.com
END
Be careful trusting TikTok for gout advice
2025-12-10
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
A study by the University of Seville links the vanishing of the specific heats at absolute zero with the principle of entropy increase
2025-12-10
In a new publication, Professor José-María Martín-Olalla, from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Seville, has described the direct link between the vanishing of specific heats at absolute zero—a general experimental observation established in the early 20th century—and the second law of thermodynamics. The study, published in Physica Scripta, reinterprets a 100-year-old problem and completes the consequences of the principle of increasing entropy in the universe.
The new study follows another published in the European Physical Journal Plus in ...
Anxiety and insomnia may lower natural killer cell count, potentially repressing immune function
2025-12-10
Natural killer (NK) cells are the bodyguards of our immune system. As a first line of defense, they destroy invading pathogens, foreign bodies, and infected cells in early stages, thereby preventing them from spreading. NK cells can circulate within the blood stream (circulatory) or reside in tissue and organs. Having too few NK cells can lead to immune system dysfunction and increase susceptibility to disease.
Anxiety disorder and insomnia are two conditions that can disrupt the normal functioning of the immune system. Given these disorders ...
How parasitic, asexual plants evolve and live
2025-12-10
There are plants that are neither green nor sexually reproductive, but precisely because of that they teach us a lot about what it means to be a plant. New research with Kobe University participation took a close look at Balanophora to learn how such non-green, asexual plants evolve and live.
“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” says Kobe University botanist SUETSUGU Kenji. He continues, “For many years I have been fascinated by plants that have abandoned photosynthesis, and I want ...
Research spotlight: A subset of patients with depression could benefit from anti-inflammatory treatment
2025-12-10
Naoise Mac Giollabhui, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham, is the lead author of a paper published in American Journal of Psychiatry, “Effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity and anhedonia in depressed individuals with elevated inflammation: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” Richard Liu, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham, is the senior author.
Q: How would you summarize your study ...
New fully digital design paves the way for scalable probabilistic computing
2025-12-10
Artificial intelligence and machine learning could become dramatically more efficient, thanks to a new type of computer component developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Tohoku University, in collaboration with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The technology is based on "probabilistic bits," or "p-bits", which are hardware elements that naturally fluctuate between 0 and 1. Unlike conventional digital bits, which are fixed in value, p-bits can efficiently explore many possibilities. This makes them well-suited for solving problems such as optimization and inference, tasks that ...
Membrane electrode assembly design for high-efficiency anion exchange membrane water electrolysis
2025-12-10
Research Background
Hydrogen energy is vital for renewable energy storage and "dual carbon" goals, but 95% of global hydrogen production relies on fossil fuel reforming (emitting ~1.3 billion tons of CO₂ yearly), driving demand for green hydrogen via water electrolysis. Anion exchange membrane water electrolysis (AEMWE) combines the advantages of alkaline water electrolysis (noble-metal-free, low cost) and proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (high current density, compact structure), but its industrialization is limited by traditional ...
U.S. debt ceiling disputes show measurable impact on global crude oil markets
2025-12-10
Background and Motivation
The United States debt ceiling—the legal limit on federal borrowing—has been a recurring source of political and economic uncertainty, especially as U.S. national debt has nearly doubled over the past decade. While existing research has explored how broad economic policy uncertainty affects financial markets, little attention has been paid to the specific impact of debt ceiling uncertainty on commodity markets, particularly crude oil. Given oil’s central role in the global economy, understanding ...
Climate extremes triggered rare coral disease and mass mortality on the Great Barrier Reef
2025-12-10
University of Sydney marine biologists have identified a devastating combination of coral bleaching and a rare necrotic wasting disease that wiped out large, long-lived corals on the Great Barrier Reef during the record 2024 marine heatwave.
The study, led by Professor Maria Byrne and Sydney Horizon Fellow Dr Shawna Foo, found that bleaching triggered by extreme ocean temperatures was followed by an unprecedented outbreak of black band disease that killed massive Goniopora corals, also known as flowerpot or daisy coral, at One Tree Reef on the southern Great Barrier ...
Direct observation reveals “two-in-one” roles of plasma turbulence
2025-12-10
Background
Producing fusion energy requires heating plasma to more than one hundred million degrees and confining it stably with strong magnetic fields. However, plasma naturally develops fluctuations known as turbulence, and they carry heat outward and weaken confinement. Understanding how heat and turbulence spread is therefore essential.
Conventional theory has assumed that heat and turbulence move gradually from the center toward the edge. Yet experiments have sometimes shown heat and turbulence spreading much faster, similar to American football players passing a ball quickly across long distances so that a local change influences the entire field almost at once. Clarifying ...
Humans rank between meerkats and beavers in monogamy ‘league table’
2025-12-10
Humans are far closer to meerkats and beavers for levels of exclusive mating than we are to most of our primate cousins, according to a new University of Cambridge study that includes a table ranking monogamy rates in various species of mammal.
Previous evolutionary research has used fossil records and anthropological fieldwork to infer human sexual selection. While in other species, researchers have conducted long-term observations of animal societies and used paternity tests to study mating systems.
Now, a new approach by Dr Mark Dyble from Cambridge’s Department ...