Biomarkers for Diagnosis of Osteoarthritis

Introduction: Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent of all the rheumatic diseases and currently only conventional imaging methods are utilised for diagnosis of OA which only detect the disease at an advance stage where there is already irreparable damage to the joint. Therefore the priority in the field is towards identifying reliable biochemical measures for early diagnosis and prediction of at risk patients for progression of the disease. Early diagnosis would enable to improve personalised treatment options and lead to better management of patients with OA. Methods: We conducted a search for articles on potential diagnostic OAbiomarkers, combining the words “osteoarthritis”, “biomarkers” and “diagnosis” using PubMed/MEDLINE bibliography. We also searched for references containing key words such as “aggrecan fragments”, “CTX-II”, “COMP”, “fibronectin”, “haptoglobin”, and “mass-spectrometry”, “PIIANP”, “PIIINP”, “S100A12”, “YKL-40” and “OA patient outcome”. The search was limited to English language articles on human studies only. Discussion: This review highlights the potential diagnostic value of established OA-biomarkers as well as new candidate biomarkers identified over the last decade. The heterogeneity of OA-phenotype and the cohort of patients used in different studies often led to conflicting biomarker data. Although currently available biomarkers have some clear relationship to OA progression in general, singly they appear to be of limited value in identifying individual patients in early disease stages and at high risk of progression. However, the renewed interest in the field is leading to discovery and validation of new candidate biomarkers that holds the promise of identifying better biomarkers for diagnosis of OA.