Men who have gout are more likely to have heart attacks, according to a new study.

Gout patients tend to be obese and have high blood pressure, but an increased risk for heart attack was present even after accounting for those and other risk factors, said lead researcher Dr. Eswar Krishnan, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

"If someone with gout comes in and he does have cardiovascular risk factors, then he should be treated very aggressively" to forestall heart attacks, he said.

For the study, which was published in this month's Arthritis and Rheumatism, Dr. Krishnan and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Los Angeles, compared heart attack rates between gout patients and men who did not have the condition.

About 10 percent of men in the gout group had heart attacks and slightly more than 8 percent of the gout-free men did, a small but telling difference in a study population of nearly 13,000.

Gout is an arthritis caused by the deposition of uric acid crystals in soft tissues and joints. According to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, it occurs in about 840 out of every 100,000 people.

The big toe is a common site, but the knees, feet, ankles and wrists can also be affected. Sometimes the crystals accumulate into a hard nodule, called a tophus, under the skin.

A patient of Dr. Krishnan's had one "the size of a football, no kidding, on his elbow," he said. "It grew over time, [but] this man did not seek medical care."

The patient will likely have surgery to excise it, and will then begin taking a medicine called allopurinol to lower his uric acid levels. Only some people with elevated uric acid, or hyperuricemia, will develop gout, but scientists don't know why it happens, the doctor noted.

The inflammation caused by gout could set the stage for clot development, which in turn could lead to heart attacks, he said.

So "if you reduce the high uric acid, you would expect a reduction in gout and a reduction in heart attack," Dr. Krishnan said. "That's the common-sense expectation. But there are no real data to validate that."