Osteoarthritis summit delineates research shortcomings, path forward

OrthoSuperSite—March 16, 2012   

A recent summit, hosted by Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, brought together international multidisciplinary physicians and specialists to help provide a foundation for addressing the issue of osteoarthritis.

“Osteoarthritis Summit: Frontiers in OA Research” was referred to in a Hospital for Special Surgery news release as a first step in building consensus about what needs to be done to advance treatments and design preventive strategies. Consensus statements and analysis from the summit can be found in the Hospital for Special Surgery Journal.

“The summit included leading scientists and researchers across all of the broad disciplines related to osteoarthritis (OA), ranging from very basic cell and molecular biology, to biomechanics, to epidemiology and clinical trials,” Steven Goldring, MD, chief scientific officer at Hospital for Special Surgery and codirector of the summit, stated in the release.

The 2-day summit brought together 35 research scientists, clinicians, physical therapists, government officials and members of the pharmaceutical, device and insurance industries.

One of the conclusions the summit came to, the release noted, involves the inadequacy of the current osteoarthritis classification system. The resulting proposal involved a classification tree that identified arthritis as spontaneous or inducted, with further classifications based on symptoms, associated bone structural abnormalities, cartilage and joint abnormalities and stage of disease progression.

“If we are going to design treatments for patients, we need to have a classification system that describes what is really driving the process,” Goldring stated. “We need to be able to know where a patient is in the progression of the disease to be able to target those specific processes that are responsible for the symptoms and loss of joint function, and select the appropriate therapy.”

Read the full story at orthosupersite.com.

Read more about Osteoarthritis Summit Frontiers in OA Research.