Studies

A new study finds that men who smoke have a decreased risk of developing gout, but that reduction does not hold true among women. About 8.3 million…
www.newsmax.com

Cigarette smoking and risk of incident gout in the Singapore Chinese Health Study

Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken). 2015 Dec 29. doi: 10.1002/acr.22821. [Epub ahead of print]
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|By Teng GG , et al.

Once in a while, an Inconvenient Truth comes along to mess with the healthy living mantra 🙈🙉🙊

Here are the abstracts:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26714165
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25086327
You can hardly fault the science. The association is repeatedly demonstrated in different populations involving large numbers.
Possible explanations for causality include uric acid as an antioxidant mopping up harmful free radicals from smoking, and toxins in cigarette smoke blunting the immune response to gout crystals.


PISS #2: Cigarette smoking retards radiographic progression in rheumatoid arthritis

Smoking is a well‐established environmental risk factor for the development of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). However, it remains unclear whether smoking influences RA disease progression and whether smokers have more radiographic damage progression …
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Studies have previously linked smoking to increased risk for developing RA. It seems that if you’ve already got RA, smoking heavily is associated with lesser joint damage.  Again, a postulated mechanism is that toxins in cigarette smoke may have a dampening effect on the immune attack on the joints.

But both smoking and RA are risk factors for cardiovascular disease, which can obviously kill; while joint damage won’t, and we now have seriously good treatment to prevent that.  The choice is obvious: stop smoking and get the RA properly treated!