Early “osteoarthritis” identification may enable treatment that enhances joint health: Researchers

Early identification of “knee osteoarthritis” may provide a chance to halt the progression of the condition and improve joint function, according to researchers.

This follows the success of a blood test used by a group of researchers from the US-based Duke University Medical Center to accurately predict knee osteoarthritis at least eight years before the disease’s telltale symptoms showed up on X-rays.

In a study that was published in the journal Science Advances, the researchers confirmed that the blood test used to identify important osteoarthritis biomarkers is accurate.

They demonstrated that it could predict both the onset and course of the illness.

Virginia Byers Kraus, a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and senior author of the paper, claims that the blood test demonstrates that “it’s possible to detect this disease much earlier than our current diagnostics permit”.

The most prevalent kind of arthritis, osteoarthritis, is thought to impact 35 million individuals in the United States.

According to the research, even though there isn’t a cure for it yet, novel medicines may be able to treat it by detecting it early on and halting its development before it’s too late.

In the UK, researchers examined a large database and examined the serum of 200 women who were Caucasian.

Osteoarthritis in the knees had been identified in half of the women; the other half was disease-free.

Age and body mass index were matched between the two groups.

A few blood test indicators were shown to be useful in differentiating the ladies with osteoarthritis in their knees from the non-affected group. Many of the women were diagnosed with osteoarthritis by X-ray testing, but these biomarkers identified the disease’s molecular signs up to eight years earlier.

This is important, according to Kraus, because it provides further proof that there are abnormalities in the joints that blood biomarkers may be able to identify long before X-rays might reveal osteoarthritis.