Ethics approval and consent to participate
In New Zealand the New Zealand Multi-Region Ethics Committee (MEC/05/10/130) and the Northern Y Region Health Research Ethics Committee (Ngāti Porou Hauora Charitable Trust study; NTY07/07/074) provided ethical approval for the study. The following institutional committees in Europe and Australia also granted ethical approval: Research Ethics Committee, University of New South Wales; Ethikkommission, Technische Universität Dresden (EK 8012012); South East Scotland Research Ethics Committee (04/S1102/41); Commission Cantonale D'éthique de la Recherche sur l'être Humain, Université de Lausanne; Commissie Mensgebonden Onderzoek regio Arnhem Nijmegen. All subjects gave written informed consent. The Database of Genotype and Phenotype (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gap) approval number was #834 for accessing data from the ARIC, FHS, CARDIA and CHS studies.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Availability of data and materials
Owing to consent restrictions it is not possible to make the New Zealand, Australian and European gout-control datasets publicly available, although they may be able to be made available from the corresponding author under appropriate request. The ARIC, FHS, CHS, CARDIA datasets are publicly-available at the Database of Genotype and Phenotype.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Funding
The study was funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand (grant 14/527). The funder had no role in the design, execution and reporting of the study.
Author contributions
RW, AJP, TRM contributed to study design, analysed and interpreted the data and drafted the manuscript. RKT, TJM, MC contributed to data analysis, interpretation and the manuscript. PR, A-KT, MJ, LABJ, TLJ, AS, JHH, LKT, ND contributed to data collection, interpretation and contributed to the manuscript draft. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Jordyn Allan, Jill Drake, Roddi Laurence, Christopher Franklin, Meaghan House and Gabrielle Sexton for recruitment. Matthew Brown, Linda Bradbury and The Arthritis Genomics Recruitment Initiative in Australia network are acknowledged. The European Crystal Network (55), formed after the first European Crystal Workshop in Paris, March 2010 (Prof Frédéric Lioté, Paris, and Prof Alexander So, Lausanne, convenors) is also acknowledged. The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities and Framingham Heart study analyses (project #834) were approved by the relevant Database of Genotype and Phenotype (dbGaP; www.ncbi.nim.nih/gov/dbgap) Data Access Committees. The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study is carried out as a collaborative study supported by National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute contracts N01-HC-55015, N01-HC-55016, N01-HC-55018, N01-HC-55019, N01-HC-55020, N01-HC-55021, N01-HC-55022, R01HL087641, R01HL59367 and R01HL086694; National Human Genome Research Institute contract U01HG004402; and National Institutes of Health contract HHSN268200625226C. LABJ was supported by a Competitiveness Operational Program Grant of the Romanian Ministry of European Funds (HINT, ID P_37_762; MySMIS 103587).
The authors thank the staff and participants of the ARIC study for their important contributions. Infrastructure was partly supported by Grant Number UL1RR025005, a component of the National Institutes of Health and NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. The Framingham Heart Study and the Framingham SHARe project are conducted and supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) in collaboration with Boston University. The Framingham SHARe data used for the analyses described in this manuscript were obtained through dbGaP. This manuscript was not prepared in collaboration with investigators of the Framingham Heart Study and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the Framingham Heart Study, Boston University, or the NHLBI.