Cherries may no longer be just for topping off ice-cream sundaes – a US study of people with gout linked eating the fruit with a 35 per cent to 75 per cent lower risk of having an attack.

They can go out and eat the cherries, but they shouldn’t abandon their medical treatment at all

Doctors have reported that some patients recommend cherries to prevent gout attacks, but the connection has only been studied a few times before, said lead researcher Yuqing Zhang, a professor at the Boston University School of Medicine.

“These findings suggest that cherry intake is associated with a lower risk of gout attacks,” Zhang and colleagues wrote in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.

But Zhang warned that the study does not prove that cherries alone prevent gout attacks, and that patients should stick with their present gout medications.

“They can go out and eat the cherries, but they shouldn’t abandon their medical treatment at all,” Zhang added.

For the study, Zhang and his colleagues recruited patients over the internet to take online surveys about their attacks.

All the 633 participants had had a gout attack in the last 12 months, had been diagnosed with gout by a doctor, lived in the US and were at least 18 years old. They also had to release their medical records to the researchers.

For the next year, the patients filled out surveys every time they had an attack. The survey asked about symptoms, the drugs used in treatment and about certain risk factors, including what they had eaten.

The researchers found that eating cherries over a given two-day period was linked to a 35 per cent decrease in the risk of having a gout attack during that period, compared to not eating cherries.