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 – was 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."