Recent Efforts to Find Disease - Modifying Treatments of Osteoarthritis

Despite high prevalence and social impact, osteoarthritis (OA) is far behind other skeletal diseases like osteoporosis in the development of disease-modifying treatments. This is mainly because little is known about the underlying molecular mechanism that could be the therapeutic target. Since OA is a multifactorial disease caused by complex interplay between environmental and genetic factors with estimates of around 50% heritability depending on the site [1], numerous efforts and great expense have been spent on human genetic studies on OA worldwide. Although linkage studies have shown large areas of chromosomes associated with the disease, they have failed to detect the susceptible genes. Candidate gene studies have proposed over 100 genes as being responsible; however, most of them have not later been reproduced in larger meta-analysis studies.