Predicting Osteoarthritis in People with Knee Injuries

Being of short stature, I often jump onto counter tops to reach the items in my cabinets. I learned the hard way that it’s best not to do that after washing the floor: Seventeen years ago, I slipped when jumping back down and broke my kneecap. It’s hurt ever since.

While I don’t yet know if I’ll be one of the 50 percent of people with knee injuries to develop osteoarthritis, there’s some interesting new research to give me a clue.

“A new clinical trial seeks to predict who is most likely to experience osteoarthritis, and to test whether an experimental treatment can prevent it altogether. Physicians are setting their sights on people who sustain a knee injury, seeking to understand why nearly half of them will later go on to develop osteoarthritis,” reports SeniorJournal.com.

The article explains that enzymes called Smad Ubiquitination Regulatory Factors or smurfs control the response of cells to growth factors. “A particular form of these regulatory enzymes, smurf2, might in fact be responsible for America’s leading cause of disability.”

“Further experiments showed that smurf2 was present in the joints of patients in early-stage arthritis, when patients might begin to experience mild discomfort, but long before other well-known molecular markers of osteoarthritis began to emerge.”

The goal of the research “is to create a simple diagnostic test to determine whether a person with a knee injury has a high level of smurf2s in their cartilage,” says Randy Rosier, MD, PhD, professor of Orthopaedics and director of Research Translation in Orthopaedics at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

“In these cases, physicians can advise the patient to stop high-intensity, wear-and-tear activity, slowing the onset of arthritis and lessening its severity. Eventually, we hope to create an injection that will stop smurf2s’ ability to turn on the calcification and degeneration process in cartilage that leads to osteoarthritis.”