Factors Influencing Allopurinol Initiation in Primary Care

I looked forward to reading this paper but at the end of it came away disappointed. I am both a family physician and researcher (including gout) and I did not feel I learnt one useful fact that could improve my practice. The one piece of clinical advice was that "managing gout as a chronic disease, with regular reviews to discuss allopurinol treatment, may reduce barriers to treatment" comes from the discussion (not their data). The most interesting part of the paper was the discussion when they referred to the works of others. The authors' speculation that patients are more likely to accept allopurinol after multiple acute attacks would be obvious to any one who sees patients with gout on a regular basis. While the team can manage large data sets and clearly have done a lot of work it seems to be a case of big data and small information.

Competing interests: None declared