Metabolic Syndrome, Alcohol Consumption and Genetic Factors Are Associated with Serum Uric Acid Concentration

Objective: Uric acid is the end product of purine metabolism in humans, and increased serum uric acid concentrations lead to gout. The objective of the current study was to identify factors that are independently associated with serum uric acid concentrations in a cohort of Czech control individuals. Methods: The cohort consisted of 589 healthy subjects aged 18–65 years. We studied the associations between the serum uric acid concentration and the following: (i) demographic, anthropometric and other variables previously reported to be associated with serum uric acid concentrations; (ii) the presence of metabolic syndrome and the levels of metabolic syndrome components; and (iii) selected genetic variants of the MTHFR (c.665C.T, c.1286A.C), SLC2A9 (c.844G.A, c.881G.A) and ABCG2 genes (c.421C.A). A backward model selection procedure was used to build two multiple linear regression models; in the second model, the number of metabolic syndrome criteria that were met replaced the metabolic syndrome-related variables. Results: The models had coefficients of determination of 0.59 and 0.53. The serum uric acid concentration strongly correlated with conventional determinants including male sex, and with metabolic syndrome-related variables. In the simplified second model, the serum uric acid concentration positively correlated with the number of metabolic syndrom