Editorial

Uric acid and cardiovascular risk in rheumatoid arthritis An association between hyperuricaemia and cardiovascu-lar disease (CVD) was suggested more than a hundred years ago but did not receive much attention, mainly be-cause there was no known mechanism that could link it pathogenically to CVD. On the contrary, uric acid (UA) was thought to be an antioxidant, leading many experts to propose that increased serum UA (SUA) levels in patients with CVD was actually a mechanism to counterbalance increased oxidative stress in these patients [1]. Up until the early 1990s, there was no reliable in vivo experimental model to study the effects of chronic hyper-uricaemia on the cardiovascular system. A major break-through though came with the use of the uricase inhibito