Usefulness of ultrasonography in the diagnosis of gout: a meta-analysis In an article published in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases,

Chowalloor et al1 suggested, based on a literature review, that ultrasonography (US) is a promising tool that could be used in the diagnosis and management of gout. In this letter, we wish to add further data to Chowalloor et al’s conclusion. We have per-formed a meta-analysis (up to July 2012) to investigate the fre-quency of ultrasonographic signs, that is, joint effusion, synovitis, bone erosion, tophi and double contour (DC), in gout and asymptomatic hyperuricaemia compared with controls (figure 1). We searched MEDLINE to identify all reports of interest pub-lished prior to July 2012 using the following search terms: (“echography”[tiab] OR “sonography”[tiab] OR “ultrasonogra-phy”[tiab] OR “US”[tiab]) and (“gout”[tiab] OR “urate”[tiab] OR “uric acid”[tiab]). We retrieved a total of 195 articles. In addition, we searched for congress abstracts from the annual sci-entific meetings held by the French Society for Rheumatology