Arthritis and arthralgia associated with toxocaral infestation.

tions is unclear. The groups compared may have been too small to obtain statistical significance. These groups were similar in size to those of others,' 2 however, and since the trends were different in men and women this would seem to be an unlikely explanation. Alprenololinduced increases in urate concentration have been shown to return baseline levels within two years despite continuous treatment. If this decreasing effect of alprenolol on urate is also true for other betablockers, no difference in urate values should be expected between patients treated long term with beta-blockers and those not treated with beta-blockers. In fact, no differences were found in this study, where the patients taking beta-blockers had been treated with such agents for an average of more than four years before the study. Moreover, this study confirmed the positive correlation between urate and triglyceride concentrations, and since triglyceride values correlate negatively with HDL-cholesterol concentrations, the negative correlation between urate and HDL-cholesterol concentrations is not surprising, although the underlying mechanism is unknown. Thus the lack of a difference in the plasma lipid and lipoprotein concentrations between patients on long-term beta-blocker treatment and those not on such treatment may be explained by the observed interrelationships between urate and these lipids and by assuming that propranolol, like alprenolol, has a decreasing effect on triglyceride and HDL-cholesterol concentrations, as well as on urate values.