A further study of the utilization of dietary glycine nitrogen for uric acid synthesis in gout.

In an earlier report (1) an experiment was described in which a test dose of glycine-N15 was fed to a gouty subject and the abundance of N'5 in uric acid as well as in other urinary constituents was measured for several days. It was found that three times as much of the administered N15 could be recovered in urinary uric acid in the gouty subject as in the two normal subjects studied. The gouty subject used in this initial study had been deliberately selected on the basis of his excessive basal urinary uric acid excretion in order to determine whether increased basal urinary excretion of uric acid, which has been found to occur in about 25 per cent of all gouty subjects studied (2), can properly be ascribed to overproduction of uric acid. In the present report are included similar experiments on three further gouty subjects, one also excreting excessive quantities of uric acid in the urine, the other two excreting amounts within the normal range under the prescribed dietary conditions.