Archaeology unearths gout in early Pacific people

High rates of gout among Māori and Pacific Island men may have a genetic basis going back thousands of years to the time when Polynesia and Melanesia were being colonised from South East Asia.

University of Otago Department of Anatomy and Structural Biology biological anthropologist Dr Hallie Buckley has been working with colleagues from the Australian National University and CNRS in Paris to analyse skeletons from a 3000 year-old cemetery in Vanuatu.

Her paper on possible gouty arthritis amongst the Lapita people – so-called because of their distinctive decorated pottery known as the Lapita style – has been published in the October edition of Current Anthropology.

"We examined the bones of 20 skeletons from the first two field seasons using radiography and other techniques and found erosive lesions or damage to the joints of seven of them. The pattern of these lesions suggests they were most likely the result of gouty arthritis," says Dr Buckley.

Gout is caused by a build-up in the affected joints of urate crystals, the result of hyperuricaemia or high levels of urate acid in the blood.

"This surprising finding suggests a very early antiquity of gout in the Pacific Islands and may help to explain the unusually high incidence of hyperuricaemia and gout in many modern Pacific Island populations, including New Zealand Māori," she says.

Other researchers have already suggested that the higher prevalence of gout in Polynesian populations may be due to a genetic predisposition. A genetic marker for gout susceptibility in Taiwanese Aborigines has been identified, suggesting that a founder effect could be responsible for this.

Dr Buckley also says the Lapita people's diet tended to consist of local plants and seafood. That purine rich seafood can set-off attacks of gout in people who are already susceptible to the condition.

"The predominance of this sort of diet may have favoured the continued selection of high frequencies of hyperuricaemia and gout in these ancient explorers."

Dr Buckley has also been working with a research team led by Durham University in the United Kingdom for a paper that has just been published in the journal American Antiquity.

Analysis of chemical isotopes in the teeth of a group of skeletons buried in unusual positions at the same site suggested that they were a group of immigrants who had joined the group from a distant location, potentially as far away as Southeast Asia.

It underscores the status of early Pacific Islanders as being amongst the best mariners on earth at that time.

The cemetery where the skeletons were found was discovered by a research team led by Professor Matthew Spriggs and Dr Stuart Bedford from The Australian National University and the Vanuatu National Museum in 2003 at Teouma, on Efate Island in Vanuatu.

They have uncovered almost 50 burials, more than doubling the number of skeletal remains of the first Pacific Islanders from anywhere around the Pacific.

Dr Buckley is leading a project examining a variety of aspects of the health of the Teouma people.

The excavation was a joint initiative of the Vanuatu National Museum and The Australian National University with funding from the Pacific Biological Foundation and the Royal Society of New Zealand. The laboratory analysis was funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund and the University of Otago.