Abstract
The healing potential of knee osteochondritis dissecans (OCD) focal lesions is not well defined. We performed a cross-sectional study correlating local and systemic biological characteristics with the patients' characteristics. We evaluated both local tissue markers (CD34, CD146, CD166, and tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase (TRAP)) and systemic serum biomarkers (fragments or propeptide of type II collagen: C2C, CTX-II, CPII, and TRAP5b) on histologically scored osteochondral fragments or serum from OCD patients. These biological features were associated with the patients' characteristics (IKDC subjective score, age, and body mass index (BMI)). Histological cartilage tissue score correlated with patients' IKDC and C2C and CPII biomarkers. CPII correlated also with histological bone tissue score. The percentage of CD146 positive cells in cartilage and CD34 positive cells in bone highly correlated with the patient's age and BMI, respectively. The percentage of TRAP in bone was directly correlated with both IKDC and age. Multivariate statistical analysis evidenced that only four parameters significantly predicted IKDC. In conclusion, a complete picture of OCD knee characteristics, defined by local and systemic markers of cartilage and bone remodeling, together with the patients' characteristics, might help to better understand the healing potential of each patient and to target and improve current OCD treatments.
Highlights
Osteochondritis dissecans (OCD) of the joints has been recently defined as a focal idiopathic alteration of subchondral bone which may cause progressive changes in articular cartilage with partial or complete osteochondral detachment [1]
Further analysis was performed to determine if cartilage and bone tissue scores were correlated with the patient’s characteristics (IKDC subjective score, age, and BMI)
We found that only cartilage tissue score was significantly correlated (Rho = 0.412; p = 0.05) with the International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) subjective score (Figure 1(c)), while there was no correlation with bone score (Figure 1(d))
Summary
Osteochondritis dissecans (OCD) of the joints has been recently defined as a focal idiopathic alteration of subchondral bone which may cause progressive changes in articular cartilage with partial or complete osteochondral detachment [1]. Depending on the size of the lesions (2 cm), OCD is treated using different surgical techniques such as microfractures, osteochondral autografts, and osteochondral allografts or using biomaterials with variable success rate [4, 5]. Different authors have reported that subchondral bone is involved in the etiopathological process of OCD. Deep knowledge on OCD etiology has been limited by the considerable variation in the analytic histological techniques used in different studies [9,10,11]. To shed some light into the healing potential of OCD
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