Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Allopurinol
Summary
Allopurinol is a medication used to decrease high blood uric acid levels. It is specifically used to prevent gout, prevent specific types of kidney stones and for the high uric acid levels that can occur with chemotherapy. It is taken orally (by mouth) or intravenously (injected into a vein).
Common side effects when used orally include itchiness and rash. Common side effects when used by injection include vomiting and kidney problems. While not recommended historically, starting allopurinol during an attack of gout appears to be safe. In those already on the medication, it should be continued even during an acute gout attack. While use during pregnancy does not appear to result in harm, this use has not been well studied. Allopurinol is in the xanthine oxidase inhibitor family of medications.
Allopurinol was approved for medical use in the United States in 1966. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Allopurinol is available as a generic medication. In 2020, it was the 42nd most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 15 million prescriptions.
Allopurinol is used to reduce urate formation in conditions where urate deposition has already occurred or is predictable. The specific diseases and conditions where it is used include gouty arthritis, skin tophi, kidney stones, idiopathic gout; uric acid lithiasis; acute uric acid nephropathy; neoplastic disease and myeloproliferative disease with high cell turnover rates, in which high urate levels occur either spontaneously, or after cytotoxic therapy; certain enzyme disorders which lead to overproduction of urate, for example: hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase, including Lesch–Nyhan syndrome; glucose 6-phosphatase including glycogen storage disease; phosphoribosyl pyrophosphate synthetase, phosphoribosyl pyrophosphate amidotransferase; adenine phosphoribosyltransferase.
It is also used to treat kidney stones caused by deficient activity of adenine phosphoribosyltransferase.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related publications (1)
Related concepts (12)
Hyperuricemia
Hyperuricaemia or hyperuricemia is an abnormally high level of uric acid in the blood. In the pH conditions of body fluid, uric acid exists largely as urate, the ion form. Serum uric acid concentrations greater than 6 mg/dL for females, 7 mg/dL for men, and 5.5 mg/dL for youth (under 18 years old) are defined as hyperuricemia. The amount of urate in the body depends on the balance between the amount of purines eaten in food, the amount of urate synthesised within the body (e.g.
Uric acid
Uric acid is a heterocyclic compound of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen with the formula C5H4N4O3. It forms ions and salts known as urates and acid urates, such as ammonium acid urate. Uric acid is a product of the metabolic breakdown of purine nucleotides, and it is a normal component of urine. High blood concentrations of uric acid can lead to gout and are associated with other medical conditions, including diabetes and the formation of ammonium acid urate kidney stones.
Purine metabolism
Purine metabolism refers to the metabolic pathways to synthesize and break down purines that are present in many organisms. Purines are biologically synthesized as nucleotides and in particular as ribotides, i.e. bases attached to ribose 5-phosphate. Both adenine and guanine are derived from the nucleotide inosine monophosphate (IMP), which is the first compound in the pathway to have a completely formed purine ring system. Inosine monophosphate is synthesized on a pre-existing ribose-phosphate through a complex pathway (as shown in the figure on the right).